In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Technology and Culture 44.2 (2003) 384-386



[Access article in PDF]
Corning and the Craft of Innovation. By Margaret B. W. Graham and Alec T. Shuldiner. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. xvi+505. $29.95.

For those hoping to gain a better understanding of the sources of industrial innovation, that is, most of us, the appearance of Margaret Graham and Alec Shuldiner's detailed study of Corning is a welcome event surrounded by many fortunate circumstances. Corning has kept innovating, neither playing it safe nor selling out. The firm has lived on a precipice. After 2000, sales of optical fiber, one of the company's greatest innovative glories—arising from pioneering over decades—fell by half. Suddenly the riotous expansion of the optical cable network ended. Only a small proportion of the buried bandwidth is in use today. Under pressure from Wall Street, whose attitude toward innovation is classically fickle, the company began scrambling for cash and laying off thousands of employees.

Repeatedly in the course of its 150-year history, Corning's fixation on specialty materials has brought it to a fork in the road, where a choice had [End Page 384] to be made between carrying out high-volume, low-margin manufacturing on its own and spinning products off to joint ventures or outright purchasers. The company has frequently faced shortages of capital to exploit all the innovations springing from the minds and sweat of its individualistic and yet cooperative engineers, scientists, and workers.

Aiding this skillful study is Corning's predilection for keeping voluminous records, going beyond correspondence to oral histories and crucial memoranda analyzing where the company is and where it should be heading. Armed with this record, the company recently went through an exercise, which Graham and Shuldiner describe in a chapter titled "Recovering Corning," to go back to its innovative roots, leaving behind an excessive focus on low-risk businesses and the tweaking of manufacturing processes.

Processes have nonetheless been a major feature in Corning's innovative history, as this study amply demonstrates. Early success in manufacturing light bulbs for Edison exposed the company to constant competitive pressure, which led, decades later, to the "ribbon machine," a device for continually producing light-bulb blanks that laid aside pure mechanization of workers' practice and plunged into automation. The machine bought Corning several decades of continued dominance in the field.

The pressure of remaining competitive in a field Corning had pioneered often drove the firm to build up its capacity in scientific realms. Over the steadfast opposition of an older relative, younger members of the Houghton family, the company's owners, took the advice of geologist Arthur Day of the U.S. Geological Survey and the Carnegie Institution of Washington and began building a corporate research organization. This departure from a tradition of closely guarding the family-held secrets of glass composition occurred during the same period in which General Electric and the Bell System plunged into industrial research with strong links to optics, physics, physical chemistry, organic chemistry, and other scientific disciplines.

The main material in the story, of course, is glass, in thousands of different formulations and structures, reaching the public—with the salient exceptions of cookware and crockery—through products sold by others. Corning has found itself developing everything from the bricks that line the furnaces in which its own glass is melted to huge, high-profile lenses for astronomy to crucial materials for catalytic converters that scrub effluents from automobile engines. Graham and Shuldiner summarize technical detail at the beginning and then elaborate throughout the text. But this account is not limited to devices and systems. It also covers intellectual property, including complex issues of patenting and licensing, the tightrope of antitrust enforcement, and the frequent necessity of making choices about whether to enter military work that might give away too much. The cast of characters includes the Houghton family, production workers, managers, scientists, and engineers, who again and again cooperate to do something [End Page 385] new. The mood is somewhat like that of the Polaroid Corporation: a small band of innovators determined...

pdf

Share