I'd be very interested to see a review of this article by someone who's familiar with the history and pace of Bell Labs' innovations. The central idea sounds pl

I'd be very interested to see a review of this article by someone who's familiar with the history and pace of Bell Labs' innovations. The central idea sounds plausible to me: that Bell was extremely innovative because it was focused on a single problem (make phones more profitable) that had a great many areas for incremental improvement (like interference, usability, durability, etc). ... innovation comes from exploring the adjacent possible. The adjacent possible is an idea that comes from Stewart Kaufmann and describes how evolutionary systems grow - at any given point you’ve got the set of things that already exist, and the adjacent possible is the set of things that could exist as the next generation from the current possibilities. Could that help explain why some of the current tech majors aren't particularly good at innovation? Taking Google as an example: they've innovated a lot in all the adjacent areas of search. But outside of search, their results have been pretty mediocre; the problems weren't adjacent.