Page 254 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

A PPENDIX B

History of

Corporate

Entrepreneurship

Labs Rule!

With the coming of the Industrial Revolution, wealth and
power came to be based on manufacturing. By the mid-1800s,
political economists noted that industrial productivity increas-
ingly depended on the application of science and technology
to industry. German economist Friedrich List wrote in 1841 in
his book, The National System of Political Economy:

There scarcely exists a manufacturing business which has no
relation to physics, mechanics, chemistry, mathematics or to
the art of design, etc. No progress, no new discoveries and in-
ventions can be made in these sciences by which a hundred in-
dustries and processes could not be improved or altered. In the
manufacturing State, therefore, sciences and arts must neces-
sarily become popular.

In the decades that followed, Germany introduced an orga-
nizational innovation: the corporate research and develop-

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