Adaptive Space: How GM and Other Companies are Positively Disrupting Themselves and Transforming into Agile Organizations

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Development Interactions of Connectors

It’s their “ideas” that appeal to me. I am quite correctly described as more of a sponge than an inventor.

—THOMAS EDISON

In late 1875 Thomas Edison bought 34 rural acres in Raritan Township, New Jersey, in order to build a groundbreaking research lab, Menlo Park. Over the next decade, the location turned into Edison’s “Invention Factory,” generating more than 400 patents. At its peak, Menlo Park occupied more than two square city blocks and included a laboratory, a glass house, a carpenters’ shop, a carbon shed, and a blacksmith shop. Edison’s Invention Factory provided the world with the phonograph, ...