A penetrating dissection of technological success and failure since 1945, Profits of Science provides an insightful, down-to-earth look at what we have learned since World War II about the management of technology.
What happens when science marries money? Robert Teitelman focuses on the interaction of business with the key frontier technologies of our era: television, microelectronics and computers, pharmaceuticals, wartime radar, and biotechnology. To shed light on broad trends in economic and scientific thought and the popular business culture, Teitelman looks at specific industries, examining how they changed and why. For example, how did quantum physics and solid-state electronics interact in the 1950s?
Why did the television-set business evolve so differently from the semiconductor business?
Profits of Science sketches out a broad scheme for understanding why technologies wax and wane, and why economies shift over time from a belief in the large corporation to a faith in the small. In particular, Teitelman stresses the role that money - from corporations, government, venture capital, public markets - plays in shaping the way technologies are exploited.
His notion of a closing gap between science and technology that fuels innovation and favors entrepreneurial firms over the giant corporation helps to explain some of the seeming paradoxes of current economic life. What creates fertile ground for innovation: size or speed? Have economies of scale been banished in the information age? What role do regulation, market barriers, and taxation play in the battle between large, established companies and small, insurgent enterprises
. The book is filled with fascinating portraits of critical figures in the science, engineering, and business communities - everyone from David Sarnoff to Steve Jobs - and engrossing accounts of such esoteric material as quantum physics, molecular biology, and corporate finance.
In our continuing quest to master the R&D process and to generate prosperity through technological innovation, amid all the talk about "changing the system" to compete better internationally, this examination of the evolution of our technological economy provides invaluable guideposts for future action.
