The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 97, July 1993 - April, 1994 Page: 61

                                
The Breakthrough Breadboard

working on deadline. The standard work week included Saturday morn-
ings. Haggerty took the first packaged model of the radio to the I.D.E.A.
Corporation of Indiana for manufacture because, like modern "switch-
board" corporations which use smaller companies to supply research,
manufacture, or sales and distribution components as needed, TI had
no consumer marketing division at the time. The company's next appli-
cation of transistor technology produced an inexpensive electronic cal-
culator, another harbinger of the computer era.5
The event Davis describes from his insider's perspective marked the
beginning of the global competition in semiconductor chip manufac-
ture that continues today, and a "second industrial revolution" which,
like the first, reduced the drudgery of labor. In this instance, computer
technology replaced the labor of computation rather than manual la-
bor. The story of the "breakthrough breadboard" also demonstrates an
early effort at "managed" or "planned innovation," a process first articu-
lated by Thomas Edison, who promised to produce a new invention
every six months at his New Jersey laboratory. By the 199os, this idea was
part of a management strategy commonly employed to increase the
speed with which new developments were made. Innovation has been
described as the integral or sum total of advances in a product's cre-
ation, whether invention, manufacture, or marketing. Conventionally as-
sociated with research and development in the physical sciences, the
best example of an innovation in manufacture is Ford's assembly line,
which exponentially increased the speed of production. In an article
published in the 198os, Haggerty explained that TI then employed sev-
enty-seven intracompany "strategies" and 591 "tactical action programs"
to maximize innovation. Rather than rely on large laboratories dedicat-
ed to systematic research, future corporate R&D may revert to the small-
er, more flexible model of the TI lab in the 1950s to respond more
quickly to management demand and to convert new technologies more
rapidly into marketable applications.
Klosterman, Swenson, and Rose (eds.), One Hundred Years of Scence and Technology in Texas,
218; Davis to Kleiner, Mar. 1993.
* Klosterman, Swenson, and Rose (eds.), One Hundred Years of Science and Technology in Texas,
18o; P. E. Haggerty, "Corporate Self Renewal," Subject Files: Texas Instruments, Inc. (BTHC).
See also Tracy Kidder, The Soul of a New Machine (Boston: Little, Brown, 1981); Prescott C.
Mabon, Mission Communications: The Story of Bell Laboratories (Murray Hill, N. J.: Bell Telephone
Laboratories, 1975); Adam Osborne, Running Wild: The Next Industrial Revolution (Berkeley,
Calif.: Osborne-McGraw-Hill, 1979); Robert Sobel, RCA (New York: Stein and Day, 1986); Texas
Instruments, Inc., Management Philosophies and Practices of Texas Instruments, Incorporated: Presenta-
tzons by Patinch E. Haggerty, President (Dallas: Texas Instruments, Inc., 1985); and P. E. Haggerty,
"Innovation and the Private Enterprise System m the United States: Address before National
Academy of Engineering, April 24, 1968," Biographical Files: P. E Haggerty (BTHC).