The activities of commercial wireless companies in the United States before World War I were critical forerunners of the unique system of property rights in the radio spectrum that developed in the United States between 1899 and 1927. These activities formed the basis for commercial claims to property rights in the spectrum during the 1920s, when radio broadcasting developed. The early wireless companies provided the material, institutional, and ideological foundations for commercial rights in the spectrum that are still a striking part of mass communication in the United States today. The De Forest/United Wireless succession of companies, although ultimately business failures, nonetheless laid the groundwork for commercial radio in the United States. Most historians of radio have overlooked the importance of the pre–World War I period, and all have neglected the contribution of the De Forest/United Wireless companies.

An 1879 contract between Western Union and Bell partitioned the electrical communications industry between the telegraph and telephone markets. Historians typically view this contract as the start of both Western Union's decline and Bell's rise, and they have treated these as largely separate processes. This article argues instead that these processes were linked by a porous and shifting boundary between the two industries. Legal, technical, and regulatory factors interacted to shape this boundary over the next century. The 1879 contract failed to keep Bell out of long-distance communications, as Bell used its market power, geographic reach, and technological superiority to penetrate this boundary. Throughout much of the twentieth century, federal regulators and Western Union executives attempted to strengthen this divide through regulatory means. The attempt failed because AT&T controlled key telegraph technologies and had considerable market power. While regulators propped up Western Union as the only competitor to AT&T, by the 1960s it was offering only token competition.

This study analyzes the evolution of organizational capabilities for assessing market growth and capital budgeting in the traffic management operations of the Bell System from 1900 to 1929. The initial impetus for developing the complex procedures that were integrated into this process was the need to enhance firm competitiveness, particularly in response to the threats to its survival during the financial panic of 1907. The resultant new organizational capabilities, however, also eventually proved vital in successfully guiding the firm's planning for system automation and in demonstrating compliance with regulatory mandates for efficient and economical service. Moreover, this study explains how probability theory became a key element in this managerial transition, thus, providing the Bell System with a powerful analytical tool useful for confronting uncertainty in budgeting and business planning.

The International Business Machines Corporation adapted early on to the opportunities created by the cold war economy in the United States. This account of IBM's adjustment to the circumstances of that time unveils the detailed process by which a firm situated outside the traditional defense industries forged new institutional allegiances between business and government and between science and industry. Beginning in 1949, IBM's Applied Science Department, under the leadership of Cuthbert Hurd, enabled the company to enter new technical markets that had been created by federal research and defense expenditures. But there were also broader consequences to IBM's decision to embrace scientific culture, among them the transformation of its traditional sales and product development strategies in ways that were not indisputably functional.

The Xerox Corporation has devised several strategies for managing the numerous spin-off firms that independently commercialized many of its technologies. From 1979 to 1998, thirty-five technology-based organizations emerged from Xerox's research centers. Contradicting the common perception that Xerox “fumbled the future” by letting its technology walk out the door, in fact the company set in motion a series of deliberate initiatives to manage its spin-off organizations. After initially adopting a laissez-faire approach, the company soon turned to ad hoc methods, which evolved into a formal internal venture capital structure and culminated in a triage process, with the result that only companies perceived by Xerox as fitting into its overall corporate strategy were retained. By using spin-offs to withdraw gracefully from areas it considered to be marginal, Xerox for feited the potential to realize value from their research. Some, but not all, of the spin-offs obtained venture capital financing from outside sources and thus prospered independently. Their success demonstrated the opportunity that Xerox missed in managing its spin-offs.