Corning and the Craft of Innovation

by Margaret B.W. Graham, Alec T. Shuldiner

For 150 years, Corning Incorporated has repeatedly succeeded in their quest to create new products for an ever-changing marketplace. Corning and the Craft of Innovation is the story of the extraordinary research and development strategy that propelled this company to its leadership position in leading-edge technologies for the new world economy.
Since its founding in the mid-nineteenth century, Corning has placed a premium on research and development in tandem with an unending spirit of innovation. Corning's innovations made possible such essential items as light bulbs, television, Pyrex, catalytic converters for cars, and high-speed telecommunications through fiber optics. Most impressive is Corning's evolution into a highly innovative producer of specialty materials. In its early days, Corning developed specialty glass for use in railroad signal lenses that had to withstand the rigors of high and low temperatures; and developed its high speed Ribbon Machine--still used today--to produce glass envelopes for light bulbs more quickly and efficiently than anyone else. Today Corning leads the world in fiber optics and is a premier provider of cable and photonic products. In 1999 Wired magazine nominated Corning for its coveted Wired Index, confirming Corning's astonishing staying power as a leading-edge company.
Corning and the Craft of Innovation examines how Corning fostered a culture of innovation while showing extraordinary patience in backing long-term projects. The book illustrates how a pattern of deliberate, regular, and profitable innovation begun 150 years ago, has put Corning at the vanguard of leading-edge technologies for the fastest-growing markets of the global marketplace. It will be essential reading for anyone interested in strategic management, innovation, science and technology or knowledge management.

Genres: Business

528 pages, Hardcover

First published April 25, 2001

Reviews

[Judith · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the history of Corning Glass Company now Corning Inc.
I did like the book but didn't read it all at this time. It's a very slow read and I will come back to it when I have more time to really do it justice.
This is a company over 150 years old and just down the highway from my in Corning NY. You can go to their museum which I've been to several times.
If you are into a history of a company and want to know the family and it's people read this book.

[Marks54 · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a company history of Corning over 150 years with a focus on its innovation activity and how that activity has evolved over the history of the firm from a craft-based effort to solve problems in glass making for the railroads and other specialized to more organized corporate R&D developing new products and production processes and testing, to work with the government during the wars, to the manufacture of television tubes to more recent innovation efforts in fiber optics and medical technology. The book is a detailed account that combines the changing leadership of innovation, with changes in organization, and changes in overall corporate strategy, including various diversification efforts and major examples of associations that today would be called joint ventures. It is, in effect, a detailed case study that is valuable for the Corning story as well as for providing data for comparing Corning's development against those of other innovative firms.

There is a temptation these days to equate innovation with what happens in various start-ups, often around San Francisco or Boston. While this is certainly part of the story, there are also large well established firms that are establishing their own research labs for the first times or else aggressively reinventing themselves as old technology industries fade and new ones arise. Corning is a firm that is informative on many dimensions. It is a firm with a 150 year history that moved from light bulbs and railroad speciality glass into new consumer businesses but also into specialized high technology businesses. After achieving a strong position in supplying the TV industry, Corning had to move into new businesses, including some that are contributing to the infrastructure of the new economy.

I am not a chemist or an engineer but found the book accessible and helpful, especially in detailing the linkages between science, business, and government. Innovation has long provided Corning with valuable intangible assets and readers looking for how abstracts ideas of innovation and technology strategy look in practice will not be disappointed.

As a corporate history, it is a bit of a slog and not all of the details of Corning's long history are equally interesting. That is not a big problem for me but the book is not a quick read.