A New Science of Progress
How can science make faster progress toward addressing big, broadly desirable goals like abundant affordable clean energy, eradicating poverty, and curing dementia? We advance research and intellectual exchange around the emerging field of Progress Studies, focused on new models for harnessing scientific inquiry to improve humanity.
The Structure of Scientific Progress
Florian Metzler's research examines how breakthrough technologies have evolved. His work -- along with a growing group of scholars -- deciphers patterns in how new technological and scientific domains have emerged from a contingent historical process.
Regional Innovation, Policy, and Prosperity
Building on a long legacy of regional studies research, the IPC continues to study how technologies and policies have made some regions more prosperous than others.
The Transistor, an Emerging Invention: Bell Labs as a Systems Integrator Rather Than a ‘House of Magic’
The transistor is one of the most consequential human inventions with dissemination of the eventual MOS-FET design estimated to exceed one quintillion devices. However, the transistor’s genesis remains poorly understood. Many received accounts associate transistor invention closely with a small group of Bell Labs scientists during the 1947-1948 period. This paper argues that such a […]
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