Please join the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute (GTMI) for a Conversation with Jon Gertner, author of a critically acclaimed book, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation.

As GTMI pursues drastically reducing the time required today to move from basic research to realizing new products or product improvements in the market, Gertner – an editor at large at Fast Company magazine – brings to us insight from what the Economist magazine called “a wonderful history of the most influential corporate-research lab the world has seen.”

As we consider new models of collaboration between industry and the academy, Bell Labs’ story of its “ivory tower with a factory downstairs” is highly relevant at Georgia Tech, where one of the university’s two original buildings featured a workshop with a foundry in which students would produce goods to sell.