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Abstracts
Albert Müller: A short history of the BCL. Heinz von Foerster and the Biological
Computer Laboratory, pp. 9–30.
The articles presents a short outline of the history of the Biological Computer
Laboratory created in 1958 as a special research unit within the Department
for Electrical Engineering of the University of Illinois, Urbana. The founder of
the laboratory, the Austrian-born Heinz von Foerster, part of the cyberneticsmovement
of the 1940ies and 1950ies, tried to develop and to “apply” findings
of the so-called Macy-group to biology with a special emphasis to problems
of perception. The consequent transdisciplinary approach of the BCL led to
certain conflicts with the main stream in the fields involved. Other conflicts
emerged on grounds of teaching experiments undertaken since the late 1960ies.
In the seventies the laboratory failed in substituting diminishing research funds
from military research ressources. In the consequence, the BCL was closed.
Ideas produced there had a major impact on other cognitive domains especially
on the social sciences in Europe.
J. Rogers Hollingsworth and Ellen Jane Hollingsworth: Radical Innovation and the
Organization of Research. An Approximation, pp. 31–66.
On the basis of broad empirical investigations the authors present a study of
28 institutions to which major discoveries in the bio-medical sciences can be
ascribed in contrast with hundred institutions doing ‘normal science’. Some
factors turned out to be of major significance for the probability to come to a
‘major break-through’. They include hybridity of the cognitive domains, ‘integrated’
or ‘organic’ structures within an institution, a high degree of horizontal
communication structures among its members and well defined goals.
Jerald Hage: The Innovation of Organizations and the Organization of Innovations,
pp. 67–86.
The author describes the prerequesites of innovation in companies and other
organizations from a comparative and trans-cultural perspective. The notion of
complex division of labour turns out to be the difficult balance between differentiation
and de-differentiation of the activities of the single actors involved in
organizations. ‘Risk-taking strategies’ and integrated cultures of organization
represent two groups of factors influencing innovation. Then, this categories
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