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Technology and Culture 45.2 (2004) 464-465



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How Breakthroughs Happen: The Surprising Truth about How Companies Innovate. By Andrew Hargadon. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2003. Pp. xvi+254. $29.95.

Once a subset of academic histories of invention and inventors, the "how to innovate" book now occupies a large field of its own. Applying the lessons of our knowledge of innovation to the real world of business is certainly useful, especially when historians of technology are out to prove their worth, but in today's crowded market one needs a much harder sell. Thus the dust jacket of How Breakthroughs Happen promises "three distinct strategies . . . that managers can implement in their own organizations," and the subtitle teases the reader with "The Surprising Truth" about the ways that companies innovate.

The central idea of Andrew Hargadon's book is "technology brokering," which involves bridging the gaps in knowledge and organizations to make the most out of technological advances and carry innovations across industries. The broker is someone who has a broad knowledge of technologies and is able to recombine ideas and processes into something new. These raw materials of innovation might occur in other fields or they might be old ideas waiting to be rediscovered. The technology broker is the person who locates, then mixes and matches these elements into new, commercially successful "breakthrough" technologies.

Hargadon takes much the same approach in constructing his analysis, delving into the social sciences for examples and methodology, and bringing the experiences of diverse industries and time periods to buttress his arguments. He begins at the logical beginning: Thomas Edison's Menlo Park laboratory, which exploited the opportunities offered by the rapid advance of physics and chemistry in the 1870s and applied them to problems in industry and commerce. Edison the great inventor is portrayed as Edison the great networker, and the same approach works for two other innovators discussed at length: Elmer Sperry and Henry Ford. Hargadon persuasively argues that the heroic inventors of the late nineteenth century were no smarter or harder working than any of their peers, just better connected. The emphasis is not on the technology but on the gathering of information and the application of old ideas to new problems. The successful inventors are those who can exploit networks of social ties.

Great emphasis is put on the social and cultural aspects of innovation, especially on the operation of informal networks that disseminate information—a welcome break from histories that are anchored to the hardware and never get out of the laboratory. Hargadon worked as an engineer and designer in the computer industry, and the best parts of his book describe the Silicon Valley equivalents of Edison's Menlo Park "Invention Factory," [End Page 464] including independent consulting firms such as IDEO and Design Continuum, and in-house innovative centers such as Xerox's PARC and 3M's Optical Technology Center. These case studies stress the importance of the communities that evolve around new technologies.

Historians of technology who read this book will find plenty to gripe about: painfully short and insubstantial accounts of key innovations, breathless transitions from one industry or era to another, almost exclusive attention to successful innovations, and broad generalizations that ignore the historical context. The book moves with an almost indecent haste and toward the end becomes a series of hurried lists of sure-fire innovative strategies. Hargadon has an annoying habit of repeating himself, especially in the overlong summaries at the end of each chapter, and seems concerned that the reader will immediately forget all the useful tips he or she has learned.

Despite these faults, there is every reason for historians to be happy with this book, for it is firmly based in our discipline and on the work of historians rather than other scholars; psychologists only get a brief mention for their work on creativity, and anthropologists—who might claim this particular approach to innovation as their own—hardly get a nod for their contributions. Instead the author relies on historians who regularly appear in the pages...

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