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Two of the central hypotheses associated with earlier versions of the product life‐cycle model are called into question. First, on the basis of 100 years of US Patent Office data on the patents granted to large European and American industrial firms, the author rejects the hypothesis that innovations almost always originate in the home country of the parent company; internationalization of industrial research is found to be neither insignificant nor a new phenomenon. The second hypothesis, that international investment is led by technology leaders, fares better, being consistent with the data. However, the author makes an extended interpretation in order to take account of more recent trends toward a much wider range of firms being engaged in internationalization, suggesting that technology leaders are now ahead in the globalization of technology, and that these firms would be most competent in exploiting the locationally differentiated potential of foreign centres of technological excellence. Technology leadership can then be said to manifest itself in superior management of internal international networks with multiple locations for innovation, rather than just in a wider geographical dispersion of investments.

The development of radio and ionospheric physics in Australia is inseparable from that of the Empire. But specific circumstances of time and place, however, coloured local advances in different ways. As in Britain, two deep-seated research traditions converged in Australia. The British influence on these fields reached its peak in the early stages and then suffered a continued decline. But in this regression the Australian community showed a mixture of longing for rivalry and a certain traditional veneration for British scientific authority, in contrast to increasingly profound respect for American technological expertise. Before nationhood was achieved in Australia, the modest community of radiophysicists managed to reconcile a sense of nationality with the openness to international stimulus, beyond the imperial horizon. The transit from a dependent Dominion towards independence had, therefore, its scientific echoes.

Bragg took up the position of Director of the National Physical Laboratory in November 1937, succeeding Joseph Petavel. He was not the NPL's first choice for the job; with his very limited experience of industrial research and abhorrence of administration, he was hardly the ideal candidate. Although Bragg may have appeared ‘overjoyed’ to get the NPL job, there was one other that he would have preferred, both on professional and personal grounds — the Cavendish Professorship of Experimental Physics at Cambridge University. He took up the Cavendish chair in October 1938.

This chapter situates hoodia within the longer history of the creation of healing plant Diasporas in South Africa from San settlement up through the process of plant prospecting at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research in Pretoria. This story emphasizes that both plants and people move, and questions the extent to which hoodia is indelibly “San”, given that it did not figure prominently in earlier depictions of Bushmen nutrition and that Afrikaaner communities historically used hoodia, too. The chapter examines herbarium records and the research of the Marshall family, Richard Borshay Lee, and the Harvard-Smithsonian Kalahari Study and finds little mention of Hoodia among San in the Kalahari. This shows the pitfalls of tying plant property to specific communities through benefit sharing in Southern Africa. The chapter indicates traditional knowledge has been constituted in the context of scientific research, building on studies of nutrition and health in South Africa.

This chapter broadens out the focus from Irish sociology to examine Irish scientific research. Its central theme is the way in which resources provided or jointly controlled by US actors underpinned the development of a modern scientific research infrastructure within the state in the period after the Second World War. The scientific fields principally affected by these financial injections were applied research related to agriculture, industry and economics. Money flowed into these fields from two major sources: the Grant Counterpart Fund, which was a legacy of Ireland’s participation in the Marshall Plan, and private US foundations. In other fields, such as management and `human sciences’, significant resource transfers took place in kind as much as in cash through productivity and technical assistance programmes. The infrastructure developments that clustered in the late 1950s and the early 1960s interacted with older scientific institutional configurations laid down under the Union with Britain and subjected to emaciating neglect after the advent of political independence.

This chapter, which concludes Part 1, argues that efforts to transform x-ray technologies into tools of plant breeding can be understood as efforts to industrialize the process of biological innovation much as other areas of technological innovation had been earlier in the century. This is illustrated through the example of a 1930s experimental program at the General Electric Research Laboratory that endeavored both to understand the nature of x-ray induced changes in living organisms and to demonstrate the potential for induced mutation in agricultural and horticultural production. Two General Electric employees, Caryl Haskins and Chester Moore, conducted experiments on a wide range of plant species with the aim of establishing a generalized method by which new traits and types could be produced through x-ray exposure. Their ambitions for introducing greater efficiency into biological innovation mirrored the aims of the industrial research laboratory as a whole, which had been conceived as a place for the efficient, regularized production of innovations. The chapter concludes with a short review of the many factors that contributed to the enthusiasm for plant breeding with x-rays in the 1920s and 1930s.

This book begins at the 1968 press conference where the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) announced the creation of the first liquid crystal displays and provided the earliest description of that technology’s history. The company’s predictions of flat-panel televisions and electronic windows that switched from clear to opaque at the push of a button captivated everyone in attendance. Newspaper articles echoed the discovery narrative set forth by RCA vice-president James Hillier. While many details in Hillier’s account of the invention of the LCD were accurate, they were not derived from first-hand experience. Instead he relied upon members of RCA’s technical staff to distill the complexities of industrial research into a streamlined summary for public consumption. Through the selective inclusion and omission of information, these scientists and engineers molded popular understandings of the LCD’s origins and commercial potential, just as they had shaped the corporation’s R&D strategy since 1951, when RCA launched its earliest flat-panel display projects.

In the motion picture industry, large East Coast manufacturers such as Kodak, GE, DuPont, and Bausch & Lomb produced materials such as lights, film stock, and lenses for production. Beginning with a brief history of the motion picture technology field before 1915, this chapter describes how the industry increasingly became reliant on these American industrial concerns. Beginning around 1916, the manufacturing side of the business was professionalized and unified by the Society of Motion Picture Engineers (SMPE), while continuing to isolate itself from the production side of the industry for another decade. SMPE emphasized standardization across companies in the manufacturing of motion picture tools, creating a stable industry and a community for knowledge sharing that had little contact with the production center in the west.

Sidney Stratton (Alec Guinness in The Man in the White Suit) knows exactly what he wants to make. He just doesn’t know how to make it. So, he engages in a trial-and-error search for the right conditions to create his nonstaining fiber. Every time he makes a new trial, however, he sets off an explosion. As the Birnley Mills building crumbles around him, he tries, tries, and tries again. Like Stratton, most movie inventors create oxymoronic products such as rechargeable batteries, flexible glass, bulletproof tires, and water-repellent hairsprays. Movie inventors are very closely associated with the slapstick humor of the 1910s to 1930s, but ultimately they owe the strength of their fictional existence to Thomas Alva Edison. His inventions brought him worldwide fame in 1877, when he was 29 years old. After that, he regularly made front-page news until his death in 1931. His creation of the phonograph, commercialization of the light bulb, and 1,091 other inventions changed the way we live. Of all his inventions, the phonograph truly came out of nowhere, so much so that a journalist dubbed him the “Wizard of Menlo Park.” He followed that up with the electric light bulb and, more important, the electric power generation and delivery system. His most profound creation was the research laboratory, discussed in the next section, which he didn’t even patent. The iconic power of Edison is evident in the observation that inventors before The Absent-Minded Professor in 1961 create in the absence of theory, while those after 1961 rely on theory to make their products. Edison wanted to invent things that interested him. He didn’t care how they worked, just that they did. He hired men with advanced degrees for their theoretical expertise but relied on them more for their specialized technical abilities. In contrast, the industrial research laboratories that were founded on Edison’s example, such as General Electric Laboratories and Bell Laboratories, among many others, were and are staffed by large numbers of trained scientists, engineers, and technicians who rely on the free flow of ideas and expertise between theory and practicality to solve problems.