Punched-card tabulating equipment, an important commercial predecessor of the computer, was used for processing large amounts of data in many business firms during die first half of the twentieth century. Life insurance was an information-intensive business dependent on firms' abilities to manage large quantities of data. This article examines both the role that tabulating machinery played in shaping insurance firms' business processes and the simultaneous role that Ufe insurance as a user industry played in shaping the development of tabulating technology between 1890 and 1950. The ongoing interaction between the Ufe insurance and tabulating industries shaped both in significant ways, setting the stage for continued interaction between the two industries during the transition to computers beginning at mid-century.

Punched-card tabulating equipment, an important commercial predecessor of the computer, was used for processing large amounts of data in many business firms during the first half of the twentieth century. Life insurance was an information-intensive business dependent on firms' abilities to manage large quantities of data. This article examines both the role that tabulating machinery played in shaping insurance firms' business processes and the simultaneous role that life insurance as a user industry played in shaping the development of tabulating technology between 1890 and 1950. The ongoing interaction between the life insurance and tabulating industries shaped both in significant ways, setting the stage for continued interaction between the two industries during the transition to computers beginning at mid-century.

Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. (KKR) played the lead role in pursuing large-scale leveraged buyouts in the U.S. market for corporate control in the 1980s by taking advantage of investment opportunities created by three decades of public policies regarding antitrust, pensions, corporate governance, and banking. KKR's innovations were its ability to overcome investors' collective action and monitoring problems by arranging takeovers through limited partnerships and by managing acquired firms through shared equity ownership with management. These organizational innovations, when combined with the financial changes of the 1980s, allowed KKR and its investor-controlled associations to challenge managerially controlled firms.

Although the U.S. steel industry's concentrated market structure and well-established production technology curbed active research by most steel firms, between 1880 and 1910 vertical research arrangements between steel producers and steel consumers, notably the Pennsylvania Railroad, became a key factor in promoting both increased innovation in basic steel products and increased innovative effort by steel producers, albeit slowly and gradually. Thus, research into steel was initiated not by steel producers but by steel consumers, who established in-house industrial research laboratories and interfirm cooperative research arrangements as a means to solve their technical problems with steel products. They also began to work toward creating an institution—the American Society for Testing Materials—that would allow for effective interaction with other consuming firms and, eventually, with producing firms to exchange information and build consensus.