INNOVATIONQ&A: Rethinking How Innovation Happens
Innovation is a concept that has become mythologized in the modern era: what it is, how to manage it, how to teach it, and how to get it to work for us. In his latest book, Professor Eugene Fitzgerald examines the forces that turn breakthroughs into value — and why innovation resists simple formulas.
Innovation is a concept that has become mythologized in the modern era: what it is, how to manage it, how to teach it, and how to get it to work for us. Despite these explorations, it remains fundamentally misunderstood, writes Eugene Fitzgerald, the Merton C. Flemings SMA Professor in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, in his latest book, “The Invisible Engine: Why Innovation Evades Control.”
Fitzgerald draws on a decade of work leading international research programs, including the MIT and Masdar Institute Cooperative Program and the MIT-Singapore Alliance for Research and Technology, where he explored innovation as the integration of market applications, technology, and implementation.
Written at a moment when artificial intelligence is reshaping how we think about knowledge, research, and innovation, “The Invisible Engine” examines a deeper question: How does innovation actually happen, and how should society invest in it?
In this interview, Fitzgerald discusses his own experiences with innovation — including his co-invention of strained silicon at AT&T Bell Laboratories in the 1990s, which helped extend Moore’s Law, the semiconductor industry’s long-standing trend of increasing the number of transistors on chips roughly every two years — while exploring common misconceptions about innovation, how to create the conditions for it, and novel ways to prepare institutions for future uncertainty.
Q: What inspired you to write this book?
A: The book really grew out of the last 10 years of work in research-to-market activity, from the MIT Masdar program to the MIT-Singapore Alliance. In science, we have professional journals and things like that that capture discoveries within individual fields, but these larger-scale projects — where science, economics, industry, and society all intersect — don’t really have an academic thread that connects them.
I wanted to write a book that condensed all of those connections, because the innovation process at that scale is really the intersection of many different fields. The dominant ones are science and economics, because those are the underlying principles that drive how innovation happens.
So I was interested in marking this moment in history and documenting the experiments we’ve done at scale — trying to understand how knowledge of the innovation process can be incorporated into large collaborative research programs.
What started as a practical effort to make these programs work became a broader and somewhat unexpected interest in the innovation process itself.
