Leadership and Business Wisdom - Social Innovation: The Research Lab.

Byline: S. Kamal Hayder Kazmi

Management is increasingly becoming the agent of social innovation.

The research lab dates back to 1905. It was conceived and built for the General Electric Company in Schenectady, New York, by one of the earliest "research managers," the German-American physicist Charles Proteus Steinmetz. Steinmetz had two clear objectives from the start: to organize science and scientific work for purposeful technological invention and to build continuous self-renewal through innovation into that new social phenomenon - the big corporation.

Steinmetz's lab radically redefined the relationship between science and technology in research. In setting the goals of his project, Steinmetz identified the new theoretical science needed to appropriate "pure" research to obtain the needed new knowledge. Steinmetz himself was originally a theoretical physicist. But every one of his "contributions" was the result of research he had planned and specified as part of a project to design and to develop a new product line, for example, fractional horsepower motors. Technology, traditional wisdom held and still widely holds, is "applied science." In Steinmetz's lab, science - including the purest of "pure research" - is technology-driven, that is, a means to a technological end.

ACTION POINT: Follow the example of Steinmetz and do market-driven research and development.

It's a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it's a depression when you lose your own.

Harry Truman

Our economy is based on spending billions to persuade people that happiness is buying things, and then insisting that the only way to have a viable economy is to make things for people to buy so they'll have jobs and get enough money to buy things.

Philip Slater

I believe in a relatively equal society, supported by institutions that limit extremes of wealth and poverty. I believe in democracy, civil liberties, and the rule of law. That makes me a liberal, and I'm proud of it.

Paul Krugman

The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.

Adam Smith

Once you realize that...