SCIENCE ADMINISTRATION LECTURE 10

1. SCIENCE ADMINISTRATION LECTURE 10 HOW TO WRITE AND EVALUATE RESEARCH PROPOSALS -- ENGINEERING RESEARCH ILLUSTRATION: SONY INNOVATES TRANSISTOR RADIOS FREDERICK BETZ PORTLAND STATE UNIVERSITY

2. TYPES OF RESEARCH INQUIRIES PROFESSION INNOVATION SCIENCETECHNOLOGY Discovery Bottleneck Theory Invention ENGINEERINGCOMMERCIALIZATION System Standards Design Processes NATURE MARKET ILLUSTRATION: SONY INNOVATES THE TRANSISTORIZED POCKET RADIO

3. CASE STUDY: SONY INNOVATES TRANSISTORIZED RADIOS Akio Morita described how Sony innovated transistors in radios in Japan. Sony’s founders were Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka (Morita, 1988). In 1944 in the last years of the World War II, Morita was finishing his education and developing his interest in the new technology of electronics. Morita was a university student studying applied physics under Professor Asada at Tokyo University. Asada’s laboratory was performing research for the Japanese navy in its war effort. Morita worked for him on electronics. Physics applied in the technology of electronics is an area of applied knowledge and in the interface between science and technology. It is in such science/technology interfaces that advanced technologies are created. Morita was being trained by Asada with a scientific orientation but motivated to create advanced technology. This provided a lasting influence on Morita as a basis for his future technological innovations in business.

4. The post-war world in Japan was one of grim survival. Morita was leading a research group in a Navy laboratory during the war. The war ended with the destruction of two atom bombs. The Emperor ordered the surrender, and American occupation forces arrived in Japan without incident. Morita waited at the station for days without orders. Finally Morita received the order to close the project. He bartered equipment for railway tickets and sent the staff home. The Morita family business was a brewery run by Morita's father. Although elder sons, such as Akio Morita, were expected to succeed their father in the business, His father was still healthy and robust and did not yet need him. Besides Morita's interests were in advanced electronics, and he accepted a position to teach physics at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. There he looked up his friend Ibuka. Ibuka was starting a new electronics company. Morita did not really want to teach. He wanted to create new technology. He decided to join Ibuka in founding a new company. He left the Institute and worked with Ibuka. His father invested in the new firm, which first they called Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Company (and later renamed Sony).

5. Morita's partner, Masaru Ibuka, had been born in 1908 in Nikko City, north of Tokyo. His father was an engineer, but he had died when Ibuka was only three years old. His mother was a graduate of Japan Women's College (Nihon Joshi Daigaku) and had taught kindergarten. Ibuka was inventive and had always been fascinated with technology. As a boy, Ibuka had liked radio and built one using three vacuum tubes. But since vacuum tubes then were expensive in Japan, Ibuka had fabricated his own tubes. Then Ibuka went the Waseda University and studied engineering. He patented the first of his many inventions while a student. During Ibuka’s whole life, he continued to invent and design. At the age of 83 in 1991, he had acquired 104 patents. He would design Japan’s first transistor radio, transistorized television, a videocassette recorder for home use, the Walkman personal stereo, and a compact disc player.

6. LESSONS FOR SCIENCE ADMINISTRATION SCIENCETECHNOLOGY Discovery Bottleneck Theory Invention ENGINEERINGCOMMERCIALIZATION System Standards Design Processes The partnership was especially productive because Morita had a family background in business (commercialization) and was educated in a science research tradition. Ibuka came from an engineering background and was educated in engineering. between them, they appreciated the perspectives of science and of engineering – both of which would be necessary to innovate the transistor. NEW TECHNOLOGIES INVENTED FROM A SCIENCE BASE REQUIRE BOTH SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH AND ENGINEERING DESIGN TO IMPROVE THE NEW TECHNOLOGY.

7. In 1946, when Morita and Ibuka formed their new firm with $500, they did not even have a product plan. They searched for a product to produce; and they considered producing radios. But Ibuka decided this was a bad commercial strategy, since he was certain the existing large Japanese electronic firms would soon produce radios and be unwilling to sell components to others. Moreover, the radio was then a standard technology and could not provide their new company with an innovative competitive edge. A small firm has a chance against bigger competitors only with strategic leadership in technology and knowledge. But what competitive edge? What product? Immediate products were necessary for cash flow survival. At first, they made shortwave radio adapters to enhance the medium-wave radios that were widely owned in Japan. Next they noted that many Japanese households had prewar phonographs that needed repair. They began making new motors and magnetic pickups. American things were arriving in Japan, and the American swing and jazz records were very popular. But the parts business was not a future. They still wanted to produce a completely new high-tech consumer product.

8. At that time they knew of the wire recorder, which had been invented in Germany just before the war. Ibuka found a company, Sumitomo Metals Corporation, that could make the special kind of small, precise-diameter steel wire for such a recorder. Ibuka decided to produce a wire recorder. But there was a problem. Sumitomo was not interested in a small order from a new, untried company; and they would not then be able to produce a wire recorder. U.S. occupation forces had taken over the Japan Broadcasting Company, NHK, and needed new technical equipment. Ibuka was familiar with audio-mixing units and submitted a bid to make one for the U.S. forces. He received a contract and made the mixing unit. When delivering the unit to the NHK station, he saw a new American high-tech product, a Wilcox-Gay tape recorder, which the Army had brought from the U.S. It was the first tape recorder Ibuka had ever seen. He looked it over and could see immediately that it had technical advantages over wire recorders. In the wire recorder, the wire had to pass over the recording and playback heads at very high speeds to obtain decent fidelity in the reproduction of sound. But the tape of the tape recorder with its wide size provided a much larger magnetic area for signal recording and therefore could be allowed to travel much more slowly in providing fidelity of reproduction.

9. Ibuka and Morita's first tape machine, which used their new plastic-based magnetic tape, had turned out to be very bulky and heavy (about 75 pounds) and expensive (170 thousand yen). Next they began learning something about the marketing of new and expensive high-tech products. Japanese consumers simply wouldn't buy it. They had to look for another market. At the time there was an acute labor shortage of stenographers, because during the war so many students had been pushed from school into war material production. Ibuka and Morita demonstrated their new tape recorder to the Japan Supreme Court and immediately sold it twenty machines. It was the breakthrough sale for their new high-tech product. They redesigned their tape recorder into a medium-sized machine (a little larger than an attaché case). They also simplified it for a single speed and sold it at a much lower price. They then sold their modified product to schools for English language instruction to Japanese students.

10. By 1950, the new company had products, tape recorders, magnetic recording tapes, and intellectual property. In 1952, Ibuka decided to try exporting their tapes and recording machines to the United States. He visited the United States to study its markets. And he had earlier read about the invention of the transistor at Bell Labs. He also visited Western Electric in New York (then the patent holder on the transistor). Ibuka was impressed by the new technology. He wanted it. In the following year in 1953, Morita went to America to purchase a license to the transistor from Western Electric (or $25,000 dollars -- a big sum to the new company in those days). Ibuka had appreciated the inherently great performance advantage that transistors potentially had over vacuum tubes. A transistor could operate at a fraction of the size and with a fraction of operating current. Ibuka and Morita knew that any business which made portable consumer electronics products would have eventually change from vacuum tube circuits to transistorized circuits.

11. LESSONS FOR SCIENCE ADMINISTRATION SCIENCETECHNOLOGY Discovery Bottleneck Theory Invention ENGINEERINGCOMMERCIALIZATION System Standards Design Processes The building of the Japanese economy -- both before and after World War II -- was facilitated by importing technologies from outside and then improving them. THE SEARCH FOR NEW TECHNOLOGIES NEEDS TO BE A GLOBAL ENDEAVOR. SCIENCE IS AN INTERNATIONAL ACTIVITY.

12. LESSONS FOR SCIENCE ADMINISTRATION Tubes to transistors -- so obvious! Now we might say that in hindsight. Yet ponder this strategic mystery. It is a historical fact that the U.S. consumer electronics industry, which in the 1950s was the greatest electronics industry in the whole world, had almost completely disappeared by 1980! The reason was a failure of technology strategy. The U.S. consumer electronics firms failed to transform their products from tubes to transistors in a timely, committed manner. That little transistor -- an American invention (and its follow-on key invention, the integrated circuit semiconductor chip) -- was the technical key to the rise to world dominance of the Japanese consumer electronics industry and the corresponding demise of the American consumer electronics industry. Why? Why did not American industry successfulLy commercial their own basic inventions – transistors and chips – over the long term – strategically? Hint! The answer lies in capital and management strategy.

13. But the transistor invention had to be improved to use it in a radio. Ibuka had to improve the frequency response of the transistor to a wider range for its application in a radio. The problem with the original transistor invented at Bell Labs was its poor frequency response. The original transistors were constructed out of two kinds of semiconductors, arranged like a sandwich, in which the middle slab controls the current flow between the outer two slabs. Since current in semiconductors can either be carried by electrons or by holes (holes are unfilled electronic orbits around atoms), one can design either hole-electron-hole carrier combinations (positive-negative-positive: pnp) or electron-hole-electron combinations (negative-positive-negative: npn). The original Bell Labs transistor had a pnp sandwich of germanium-indium-germanium. Electrons (the negative carriers) inherently move faster through a semiconductor than holes (the positive carriers). The physical reason for this is that holes wait for an electron to put into its empty orbit from a neighboring atom before that empty orbit appears to have moved from one atom to another. This is inherently a slower process than a relatively freely moving electron passing by one atom after another.

14. LESSONS FOR SCIENCE ADMINISTRATION SCIENCETECHNOLOGY Discovery Bottleneck Theory Invention ENGINEERINGCOMMERCIALIZATION System Standards Design Processes IN ANY NEW TECHNOLOGY, THERE ARE ALWAYS BOTTLENECKS TO PERFORMANCE. THESE MUST BE OVERCOME, IMPROVEMENTS IN TECHNOLGY, FOR APPLICATIONS OF THE TECHNOLOGY.

15. The first thing the Sony researchers had to do to make the new technology of the transistor useful was to speed up the signal processing capability of the transistor by using electrons rather than holes as carriers. The Sony researchers accordingly reversed the order of the transistor sandwich: from a positive-negative-positive structure to a negative-positive-negative structure (indium-germanium-indium). The development of the transistor by altering its phenomenal basis from hole conduction to electron conduction is an example of a knowledge strategy. If Ibuka's and Morita's new electronics firm had been staffed with only electronics engineers and without any scientists, they would not have been able to understand the new physics of semiconductors. They would not have had the technical imagination to begin developing the transistor, knowing they could reverse the combination to seek a higher frequency response. Ibuka and Morita had established a firm with both an innovative electronics technical capability and also with an innovative applied physics capability. That's how Morita was trained. Applied physics underlay Morita's knowledge strategy.

16. LESSONS FOR SCIENCE ADMINISTRATION SCIENCETECHNOLOGY Discovery Bottleneck Theory Invention ENGINEERINGCOMMERCIALIZATION System Standards Design Processes OVERCOMING A BASIC BOTTLENECK OF THE NEW TECHNOLOGY OFTEN REQUIRES A NEW DESIGN BASED UPON A DEEPER SCIENTIFIC UNDERSTANDING OF NATURE: If Ibuka's and Morita's new electronics firm had been staffed with only electronics engineers and without any scientists, they would not have been able to understand the new physics of semiconductors. They would not have had the research imagination to begin developing the transistor, knowing they could reverse the combination to seek a higher frequency response.

17. The new firm had good research physicists. During the course of the transistor research one of them, Leo Esaki, discovered a new fundamental phenomenum of physics -- quantum tunneling (in which electrons can sometimes tunnel through physical barriers that would bar them, if they obeyed classical physical laws and not quantum physics). In 1973, Esaki won the Nobel Prize in physics. The next problem the researchers faced was the choice of materials for the bases of the transistor and its impurities. Without adding a small quantity of different atoms “doping”, neither germanium or indium conducts electricity. The doped atoms “impurities” make these materials semi-conducting, as opposed to non-conducting. They decided to discard the indium used in Bell Labs' original version of the transistor. Indium had too low a melting point for use in a commercial transistor. They tried working with the combination of gallium with antimony as its doping atom. That didn't work well either. Next they tried replacing the doping element of antimony in the gallium with phosphorus. At first, the results were not encouraging, but they persisted. Eventually they found just the right level of phosphorus doping. Then they had an npn transistor of gallium-germanium-gallium structure, with just the right amount of phosphorus atoms doping the gallium materials. Sony researchers had developed a high-frequency germanium transistor, which was commercially adequate for their pocket radio.

18. LESSONS FOR SCIENCE ADMINISTRATION SCIENCETECHNOLOGY Discovery Bottleneck Theory Invention ENGINEERINGCOMMERCIALIZATION System Standards Design Processes Improvement of the performance of the transistor also required getting the model of the transistor processes right, in the case of doping: “Next they tried replacing the doping element of antimony in the gallium with phosphorus. At first, the results were not encouraging, but they persisted. Eventually they found just the right level of phosphorus doping.” Engineering in a new technology requires models of the phenomenon underlying the technology and proper manipulation of the phenomenon.

19. So the radio -- the consumer product that Ibuka would not produce a few years back (since at that time the new firm had no technological competitive advantage) -- would now become a second flagship product line, the pocket radio. In 1955, they produced their first transistorized radio in a small size, as a pocketable transistor radio. However, since the radio turned out to be just a little larger than a standard men’s shirt pocket, they did sew a slightly larger pocket on the front of their salesmen shirts, when they went out to market the new product. The development of the transistor for radio application is an example of the Japanese acquisition of a foreign-invented applied knowledge and the subsequent improvement of that knowledge for commercialization by their knowledge asset capability of applied research in science and engineering. This pattern of acquisition of foreign-originated knowledge and subsequent improvement of applied knowledge for commercialization was the common pattern in both early and later industrial development of Japan that led to its emergence first as a world-military power and second as a world-economic power

20. With their new knowledge strategy of the transistor and the new product of the pocket radio, Ibuka and Morita decided to change the name of the new firm, changing from the Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Company to Sony. When Sony introduced its transistorized pocket radio into America, they discovered that Texas Instruments had independently innovated a transistorized pocket radio. But Texas Instruments had no strong commitment to the consumer market, and they soon dropped the product. Sony was committed to the consumer electronics market and began their climb to a world leader in consumer electronics. Sony focused upon the consumer electronics market and became an innovative, high-tech, top-quality consumer electronics firm and a giant, global company. Sony also introduced the first transistorized small black and white television set. In color television, Sony innovated a single-gun, three-color TV tube. It innovated the Walkman series of miniature audio players. It innovated the first home video cassette recorder (VCR), after the industrial version had been invented in the United States.

21. LESSONS FOR SCIENCE ADMINISTRATION SCIENCETECHNOLOGY Discovery Bottleneck Theory Invention ENGINEERINGCOMMERCIALIZATION System Standards Design Processes The S&T capability of Japanese economic development has lain in an outstanding capacity for applied research as opposed to basic research. But this has required the import of new technologies by basic research in other nations: The development of the transistor for radio application is an example of the Japanese acquisition of a foreign-invented applied knowledge and the subsequent improvement of that knowledge for commercialization by their knowledge asset capability of applied research in science and engineering.

22. SUMMARY: LESSONS FOR SCIENCE ADMINISTRATION THE PARTNERSHIP, IN ESTABLISHING SONY, DREW UPON AN APPRECIATION OF BOTH PERSPECTIVES OF SCIENCE, ENGINEERING WHICH WILL BE NECESSARY TO INNOVATE THE TRANSISTOR. THE SEARCH FOR NEW TECHNOLOGIES NEEDS TO BE A GLOBAL ENDEAVOR. SCIENCE IS AN INTERNATIONAL ACTIVITY. IN ANY NEW TECHNOLOGY, THERE ARE ALWAYS BOTTLENECKS TO PERFORMANCE. THESE MUST BE OVERCOME, IMPROVEMENTS IN TECHNOLGY, FOR APPLICATIONS OF THE TECHNOLOGY. OVERCOMING A BASIC BOTTLENECK OF THE NEW TECHNOLOGY OFTEN REQUIRES A NEW DESIGN BASED UPON A DEEPER SCIENTIFIC UNDERSTANDING OF NATURE. Engineering in a new technology requires models of the phenomenon underlying the technology and proper manipulation of the phenomenon. The contribution of S&T policy toward economic development lies directly in capacity for applied research and indirectly in basic research.