Most literate people know that Benjamin Franklin discovered fundamental characteristics of electricity by flying a kite in a thunderstorm. That was in 1752. About 125 years later Thomas Alva Edison discovered and patented the electric light bulb that changed the world in dramatic ways. What about more recent world changing developments and the inventors responsible for them?
The transistor, invented in 1947 by John Bardeen and a team of scientists at Bell Labs eventually was capable of being mass-produced by the millions on a sliver of silicon—the semiconductor chip. It is this almost boundless ability to integrate transistors onto chips that has fueled the information age. Today these chips are important in devices as diverse as video cameras, cellular phones, copy machines, jumbo jets, modern automobiles, manufacturing equipment, electronic scoreboards, and video games. Without the transistor there would be no Internet and no space travel.
And what about those little dots of red or green light that provide information on the functions of various electronic devices and never burn out? They are light emitting diodes, invented in 1962 by Nick Holonyak who was a consulting scientist at General Electric at the time.
In 1981 the computer world changed once again. Technically known as the graphic user interface or GUI, a device that became ubiquitous, the mouse, became the preferred way for personal computer users to communicate with their machines. The inventor was Douglas Engelbart, then at Stanford Research.
The threat to business as usual comes from a number of directions but especially from exponential advances in science and technology. Inventions that can change, even eliminate or create entire industries, pop up daily.
Long after the current financial has exited center stage, executives will be challenged to understand and respond to the yawning and growing gap between conventional, time-worn business practices and the breathtaking discoveries occurring in laboratories around the world. Why is this relevant to today’s busy executive? The late Peter Drucker, who was credited with being the father of modern management, explained:
“Innovation requires us to systematically identify changes that have already occurred in the business—in demographics, in values, in technology or science—and then to look at them as opportunities. It also requires something that is most difficult for existing companies to do: to abandon rather than defend yesterday.
“The entrepreneur has to face the fact that the new product or service is not successful where he or she thought it would be but is successful in a totally different market. Many businesses disappear because the founder-entrepreneur insists that he or she knows better than the market.”