What we hear from Bose

On 12 July the world lost Amar Gopal Bose, but we will be hearing his contributions for many years to come. Bose had a remarkable 45-year teaching career at MIT’s department of electrical engineering and computer science, where he undoubtedly influenced the careers of hundreds of students who took his courses or admired his contributions to acoustics, electronics, and business.

Beyond the MIT community, Bose is a familiar and admired brand name. The Bose Corporation —the company he founded and led through its entire history— improved the way we hear music, from the solitude of an individual headphone shutting out background sounds, to mimicking near-concert-hall acoustics in your home, to a crisp broadcast from the town bandstand.

I was fortunate to be a student at MIT in the mid-1960s when Bose was just analyzing how we hear and appreciate music in the concert hall. He found that our ear and auditory senses process a complex mixture of sound coming directly from the source and reflecting from nearby surfaces.

From this discovery came the first Bose product—the 901 speaker system , which used an array of small and relatively inexpensive speakers arranged to both beam sound directly at the listener and reflect sound from the walls of the listening environment. Bose Corp grew to a billion-dollar-class enterprise that has sustained a globally trusted brand for sound systems of all sizes. Indeed, they are expensive, but Bose products lead the market in performance and quality. I still own and use every Bose product I ever bought.

In the interest of full disclosure, I confess that I didn’t exactly buy my first Bose product. As an undergraduate at MIT, I started a modest science project in my sophomore year that three years later turned into my master’s thesis. The project involved very sensitive acoustic measurements that had to be done in a special room surrounded on all sides by meter-long sound-deadening cones. Such “anechoic chambers” are needed for accurate measurements of microphone and speaker performance. Given the need for that special facility by Bose and the other well-known acoustics researchers at MIT, I was relegated to the proverbial graveyard shift.

Despite being largely isolated during those overnight hours, I got to know a number of MIT students who produced reasonable sketches of their own version of the famous 901 speakers with the intent to construct one. With the help of the local electronics parts shops and the MIT wood-working shop, a few enterprising students succeeded in building pretty good copies. (I imagine that the best of these copycats were hired by Bose for the real thing.)

According to Bose, his company has been able to maintain its strong market position by investing continuously in new product-related R&D. He believed that his company’s level of R&D spending would not be possible if his corporation were publicly held, as such expenditures are subject to the whim of the daily review of the stock markets for short-term returns. One has to ask, is that an important lesson for corporate innovation?

Certainly, not having to answer immediately to market pressures gives innovators with their own financial resources more freedom to invest in R&D as they see fit. On the other hand, the markets can substantially reward a company for its investments in product innovation, if subsequent earnings are real, positive, and sustained. Apple, in its second phase of leadership by Steve Jobs, is a well-known example. A common feature of both companies is their visionary leadership in product innovation and corporate management alike.

We remember Amar Bose as a scientist, teacher, inventor, and businessman. Through his life’s work, he touched many—his students, the research and business communities, and all of us who enjoy listening to music the way that it’s meant to be heard.

Fred Dylla is the executive director and CEO of the American Institute of Physics.