A desire to recreate great things from the past always comes with some hindsight bias. What we'd like is a dataset about hundreds of labs like PARC and what happened to them. Of course, we could never get it, so we have to work with our observed history. But sometimes, in the case of these big labs, I wonder how much we can conclude.
I recently read The Idea Factory, about Bell Labs, and it has great insights, to be sure, but enough information about the causality to recreate Bell Labs? I don't know.
Maybe it really does come down to one thing, like funding, as the top comment (currently) on this thread suggests. But I doubt it.
When I was younger, my siblings and I played this game that we sort of made up as we went (too detailed to explain), and it was awesome. Years later, in a bout of nostalgia, we tried to recreate it and it was just awful. Enough small details had changed that it didn't work. One of the important details that changed was a total lack of spontaneity. All of us knew what the outcome should be like, and it made us behave differently. I don't think big orgs are at all immune from this effect of expectations.
Don't get me wrong, I'm obsessed with the famous labs like anyone, a big fan of Alan Kay, etc. I just think somebody needs to call attention to a giant hurdle in learning from them.
There's another lab that was successful in a somewhat similar manner, a way larger scale, but still great results.
I recently bought a book on the Philips Natlab, same idea as Xerox PARC. They invented the optical drive (cd's), the wafersteppers that bootstrapped ASML, the company behind the machines that create chips and some other inventions that I can't find right now.
I have more details in the Natlab book which I have at home, if you're (or anyone else is..) interested.
I recently read The Idea Factory, about Bell Labs, and it has great insights, to be sure, but enough information about the causality to recreate Bell Labs? I don't know.
Maybe it really does come down to one thing, like funding, as the top comment (currently) on this thread suggests. But I doubt it.
When I was younger, my siblings and I played this game that we sort of made up as we went (too detailed to explain), and it was awesome. Years later, in a bout of nostalgia, we tried to recreate it and it was just awful. Enough small details had changed that it didn't work. One of the important details that changed was a total lack of spontaneity. All of us knew what the outcome should be like, and it made us behave differently. I don't think big orgs are at all immune from this effect of expectations.
Don't get me wrong, I'm obsessed with the famous labs like anyone, a big fan of Alan Kay, etc. I just think somebody needs to call attention to a giant hurdle in learning from them.