Even as a forty-year veteran of the synthesizer industry, I learned a ton from The Sound of Innovation. While the legal and business considerations are interesting on their own, it's their intertwining with musical and technological developments that makes this story so magical. Andrew Nelson's thorough recounting of CCRMA's unique history with all the successes, failures, and tales of the weird and wonderful makes for a great read.
Dave Smith, legendary instrument designer, Fellow of the Audio Engineering Society, and 2013 Grammy winner
Every year brings a new crop of books promising the secret formula to innovation in your organization. Very few are based on research and evidence. By bringing to life the story of the remarkable fusion of music and computer science at Stanford, Andrew Nelson has provided a work of not only insight but also usefulness. Everyone in government, business, and academia should read it.
Dane Stangler, Vice President, Research & Policy, Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation
The Sound of Innovation deftly unpacks the relationship between university research, commercial interests, and new innovation-driven fields. Nelson reveals both the opportunities and the tensions that emerge at unexpected intersections, interweaving a story of entrepreneurial individuals with a rich and detailed sociological analysis. The result is an unprecedented investigation into the origins and impact of interdisciplinary innovations in the creative arts.
Fiona Murray, Associate Dean for Innovation and Co-Director, MIT Innovation Initiative, and William Porter (1967) Distinguished Professor of Entrepreneurship, MIT Sloan School of Management
The Sound of Innovation goes beyond many chronicles of inventive, entrepreneurial, or organizational success, in not glossing over the uncertainties, obstacles, and serious setbacks, and in offering a structured analysis of the particular, concrete instantiations of processes that reconceptualizes them in more general and abstract terms. With the aid of fresh frameworks and concepts (including 'radical interdisciplinarity,' 'informal technology transfers,' and 'multivocality'), its author arrives at important concluding insights that should be welcomed by those concerned with the formulation of public policies for science, technology, and innovation.
Paul A. David, Professor Emeritus of Economics and by courtesy History, Stanford University; Senior Fellow, Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research; Emeritus Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford