EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

How technoscientific knowledge advances: A Bell-Labs-inspired architecture

Venkatesh Narayanamurti and Jeffrey Y. Tsao

Research Policy, 2024, vol. 53, issue 4

Abstract: Understanding how science and technology advance has long been of interest to diverse scholarly communities. Thus far, however, such understanding has not been easy to map to, and thus to improve, the operational practice of research and development. Indeed, one might argue that the operational practice of research and development, particularly its exploratory research half, has become less effective in recent decades. In this paper, we describe a rethinking of how science and technology advance, one that is consistent with many (though not all) of the perspectives of the scholarly communities just mentioned, and one that helps bridge the divide between theory and practice. The result is an architecture we call “Bell's Dodecants,” to reflect its six mechanisms and two flavors, and their balanced nurturing at Bell Labs, the iconic 20th century industrial research and development laboratory.

Keywords: Technoscientific method; Scientific method; Engineering method; Question-and-answer-finding; Punctuated equilibria; R&D; Bell Labs (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O31 O32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048733324000325
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:respol:v:53:y:2024:i:4:s0048733324000325

DOI: 10.1016/j.respol.2024.104983

Access Statistics for this article

Research Policy is currently edited by M. Bell, B. Martin, W.E. Steinmueller, A. Arora, M. Callon, M. Kenney, S. Kuhlmann, Keun Lee and F. Murray

More articles in Research Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:eee:respol:v:53:y:2024:i:4:s0048733324000325