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Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators by Helen Marot
page 13 of 106 (12%)
enterprise that this division of labor has been carried from the
machine shop and the factory to the scientific laboratories where
experiment and discovery in new processes of technology are developed,
and where, it is popularly supposed, a high order of intelligence is
required. The organization of technological laboratories, like the
organization of construction shops to which they are auxiliary, is
based on the breaking up of a problem which is before the laboratory
for its solution. The chemists, physicists, machinists and draftsmen
are isolated as they work out their assigned tasks without specific
knowledge of what the general problem is and how it is being attacked.
Small technological laboratories are still in existence where
the general problem in hand is presented as a whole to the whole
engineering staff, and is left to them as a group for independent and
associated experimentation. But even in such cases the technological
content does not necessarily supply the impulse to solve the problem
or secure a free and voluntary participation in its solution. Those
who are interested in its solution are inspired by its economic value
for them. In all technological laboratories, either where the problem
is broken up and its parts distributed among the employees of the
laboratory, or where it is given to them as a whole for solution, it
is given not as a sequence in the creative purpose of the individuals
who are at work on it, nor is its final solution necessarily
determined by its use and wont in a community. Problems brought to
the laboratory are tainted with the motive of industry which is not
creative, but exploitive.

The tenure of each man employed in production is finally determined
not by any creative interest of his own or of his employer but by
whether in the last analysis, he conforms better than another man to
the exigencies of profits. If profits and creative purpose happen to
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