Description: Class 7 will note that although innovation systems function at the institutional level in the public and private sectors, they also must function at the personal, face-to-face level. The class will review a series of breakthrough innovations and look at the R&D teams that assembled them, discussing the organizational rule sets that appear to be common to these great innovation groups. The focus groups include Edison’s “Invention Factory”, Oppenheimer and Los Alamos, Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley at Bell Labs, Boyer and Swanson founding Genentech, Venter and the genome project, and Robert Taylor at Xerox Parc. 

NOTE: This class will be student-led, organized with a larger group of students (not just two discussion leaders) presenting the particular readings, and with less of a lecture format. There is a longer reading list, so students don’t need to read all the readings—but all students should read the following three readings, as follows: the William Rosen book sections, the Warren Bennis/Patricia Biederman closing chapter on pp. 196–218, and the Edgar Schein book sections, in that order. Then students should, in addition, select and read about any three of the six innovation “great groups” listed below the first three readings. A number of students will be asked to present on particular innovation groups. Part one of two.

Instructor: William Bonvillian