Adventures in Innovation: Inside the Rise and Fall of Nortel

In 1966, recent art college grad, John F. Tyson, became the first industrial designer hired by Northern Electric, Bell Canada’s modest manufacturing arm. In 2000, he retired as vice-president of advanced technology for Nortel, then the world’s leading supplier of communications networks.

Adventures in Innovation—Inside the Rise and Fall of Nortel chronicles John F. Tyson's journey from student to senior executive when an entirely new world of human communications came into being. He traces the development of corporate identity, vision, and activities of Bell-Northern Research (BNR), which would become one of the most innovative and widely respected research-and-development organizations in the world.

Throughout, he candidly portrays the many colourful personalities he met along the way who helped realize grand visions. As an innovator and passionate champion of R&D, he offers critical insights into the interplay of innovation, vision, and leadership as the key to corporate success. He details some of his own pioneering work in user-centred design and market research methods, translating the philosophical to the tangible within a collaborative community of people, process and product, and delivering groundbreaking innovations to the marketplace.

In Adventures in Innovation, John F. Tyson gives readers an insider’s compelling perspective on a turbulent time in communications history, all written with humour and the sense of wonder and delight that marked his fascinating career.