# Bell Labs This is not Fisk saying that the only relevant problems in electrical communication were those that served Bell’s business interests. But it was him saying that: - Many scientific problems are kind of a bore or derivative. He ballparked it arbitrarily at 90%. - Some minority of problems are interesting. He ballparked it arbitrarily at 10%. - 1%-2% of the interesting problems — that is .1%-.2% of the total problems — would turn out to be worthwhile _and_ relevant to Bell’s work. The picture this paints of Bell’s preferences for its basic researchers is twofold: 1. The universe of possible problems is very large. Bell would like its more fundamental researchers to feel free to work on interesting ones. 2. Among those interesting problems, Bell Labs management would implement systems to make sure researchers identified problems that had a high probability of turning into profitable answers for the Bell Telephone system. Over the years, Bell Labs management developed a small but coherent set of constraints and rules of thumb to ensure that its researchers internalized that, as Jim Fisk put it, it was “a matter of individual responsibility” to choose the right problems and that Bell Lab’s success in doing this at scale, across thousands of individuals, was “essentially automatic.” The three key ways Bell Labs nudged its basic researchers toward the right problems were: 1. Granting researchers what I’ll call a “long leash, but a narrow fence” in which to conduct their explorations. 2. Facilitating very regular interactions between the basic researchers and Bell’s fundamental development researchers, engineers, manufacturing facilities, and implementation staff. 3. To top it off, Bell had a corps of what they called systems engineers who ensured that the integration of its best researchers and most pressing problems was not left to chance. --- Date: 20240427 Links to: Tags: References: * [How did places like Bell Labs know how to ask the right questions?](https://www.freaktakes.com/p/how-did-places-like-bell-labs-know) * [The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation: Gertner, Jon: 0884819703136: Amazon.com: Books](https://www.amazon.com/Idea-Factory-Great-American-Innovation/dp/0143122797)