What is innovation? What does it look like?

Kelly embraced the uncertainty of working on the cutting edge, as did his successors, John Pierce and Bill Baker. They sharply contrast with Stephenson's would-be innovators of today, whom he imagines overwhelmed by their presumed omniscience. With Google at their fingertips, Stephenson argues, they've grown timid. A promising idea might appear; it's promptly fed into the technological oracle, and a judgment comes back, a case history. Of course, there are no substantially new ideas; this one's already been tried. "If it failed," Stephenson writes, "then no manager who wants to keep his or her job will approve spending money trying to revive it. If it succeeded, then it’s patented and entry to the market is presumed to be unattainable, since the first people who thought of it will have 'first-mover advantage' and will have created 'barriers to entry.' The number of seemingly promising ideas that have been crushed in this way must number in the millions." This is diametrically opposed to the Bell Labs way: rather than build the future, it only excavates and reiterates the past.

The question winds through The Idea Factory: what is innovation? What does it look like? How does it happen, and how can we make it happen more often? Today it's become a vacuous buzzword – stumbling companies just need to "remember how to innovate," as though they'd simply misplaced the instructions for the innovation machine – but the men who ran Bell Labs genuinely believed they had a valuable formula for innovation. Kelly explained it to anyone who asked: failure was necessary. The odds of creating a new and popular technology were always stacked against the innovator; only where the environment allowed failure could truly groundbreaking ideas be pursued.

John Pierce tried to define more concrete precepts, and established four. First, management had to be technically competent; at Bell Labs, all managers were former researchers. Second, no researchers should have to raise funds. They should be free of that pressure. Third, research should and would be supported for years – if you want your company to last, take the long view. And finally, a project could be terminated without damning the researcher. There should be no fear of failure.

It's hard to imagine many places today where such guidelines might be set in stone, though Gertner notes that Google's "twenty-percent time" had an analog at Bell Labs, where researchers often pursued their own informal projects. And The Idea Factory acknowledges that the institution's remarkable streak of innovation may be as much a historical anomaly as the product of any transferable formula. Bell Labs, after all, was a subsidiary of AT&T, a regulated monopoly which was also for many years the nation's largest employer. It was a deep-pocketed patron with no competitive pressure; the long-term view that looked like a survival strategy could also be a kind of arrogance. If AT&T simply assumed it would be around for the next several decades, why not spend some of its ample income tinkering with possible futures?