Page 255 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

240 Appendix B

ment (R&D) laboratory. Companies such as Hoechst, Bayer,
and BASF were early adopters. Other companies in Europe
and the United States followed their lead. Around the begin-
ning of the twentieth century, large U.S. companies, beginning
with those in chemicals and electronics and then spreading to
most large manufacturing industries, set up centralized R&D
labs to drive innovation. General Electric, AT&T, DuPont,
Corning, and Kodak led the way. According to Richard Rosen-
bloom and William Spencer in Engines of Innovation, between
1919 and 1936, U.S. manufacturing companies established
1,150 industrial research laboratories. The number of indus-
trial research professionals (scientists and research engineers)
employed by these companies grew from 2,775 in 1921 to
27,777 by 1940.
World War II fostered the “Age of Big Science.” Companies
such as General Motors, General Electric, Westinghouse, AT&T,
and IBM, in partnership with government laboratories and uni-
versities, supported the war effort with both industrial produc-
tion and technological capabilities. The atomic bombs dropped
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki made the whole world aware of the
awesome power of large-scale applied science and technology.
On August 6, 1945, sixteen hours after the atomic attack on
Hiroshima, President Harry S. Truman made a public statement:
“We have now won the battle of the laboratories. . . . What has
been done is the greatest achievement of organized science in
history.”
Vannevar Bush, director of the U.S. Office of Scientific
Research and Development during World War II, captured the
mood of the time in his 1945 report, Science: The Endless Fron-
tier. The report promoted what came to be known as the “lin-
ear model” of development, the idea that investment in
high-quality science would provide a foundation for new tech-
nologies that could be turned into a cornucopia of profitable