Archive for 23 October 2008
Who Invented the Internet?
| Peter Klein |
OK, we now know it wasn’t Al Gore. (And John McCain didn’t didn’t invent the BlackBerry either.) But who did invent the internet? Physicists have long maintained that they did. Michael Nielsen (via Josh Gans) disagrees:
It’s true that the principal inventor of the web, Tim Berners-Lee, was a programmer working at CERN, the huge European particle accelerator. In 1988 he sketched out a way of hooking up hypertext ideas, developed by people like Ted Nelson and Bill Atkinson, to the internet, developed by people like Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn. He talked the idea up at CERN for a year, with no response. In 1989 he wrote up and circulated a formal proposal around CERN. Again, no response for a year. Finally, he coded up a prototype in his spare time. In this, he actually was helped by his manager, who said it was okay if he used one of CERN’s workstations to build the prototype. It was launched to the world about one year later.
Berners-Lee didn’t succeed because CERN was doing fundamental research. He succeeded in spite of it.
Nielsen goes on to make a more general claim about large organizations tending to stifle innovation, but that is a more complicated and difficult issue. Yesterday in my entrepreneurship class we discussed Zoltan Acs and David Audretsch’s 1990 book Innovation and Small Firms, which paints a more nuanced picture (e.g., the relationship between firm size, scope, complexity, etc. and innovation varies widely by industry, market structure, time, manufacturing technology, and the like).
Here is my take on the history of the internet, and here is an academic paper on internal capital markets and innovation.
Heckman on Academia
| Peter Klein |
Steve Levitt links to this update on the travails of the University of Chicago’s proposed Milton Friedman Institute. Jim Heckman, an Institute supporter who has recently expressed public doubts about its conception and development, is on the hot seat. Heckman makes an interesting observation, in passing, that relates to a previous discussion of research funding:
Heckman added that all institutes are affected by bias, citing hiring decisions as a source of bias throughout the University.
“I doubt there is a truly unbiased academic. Besides, most biased people don’t see themselves as biased. If you think the [Chicago Graduate School of Business] is an unbiased environment, think again. They are recruited for their views. I wonder also how many free marketers would get jobs in anthropology or sociology,” he said.
“It’s true for any institute. You state a mission, attract funders. They expect the mission to be fulfilled. Very rarely do people fund pure knowledge,” he said.
Organizations and Markets 
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