Idea Factory is an excellent book, one of my favorites, I just finished rereading it a few weeks ago.
I'd also recommend Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed[0] by Ben Rich.[1] Rich was the second director of Lockheed's Skunk Works and protégé of its founder and famed aerodynamicist Kelly Johnson.[2]
The book covers the creation of the U-2 spy plane, SR-71 Blackbird, F-117 Nighthawk, stealth technology in general, and talks a bit about the F-22 Raptor. I'd recommend the book even if you're not super into aerospace or defense tech. It's amazing what the Skunk Works was able to achieve with such a small contingent of dedicated engineers, technicians, machinists, and managers for so little when left alone to do what they knew best.
In my opinion, these days, the term 'skunk works' is all too often used to describe a company's secret R&D wing when it would be more appropriate to use it to describe a small walled off portion of a company with tenure, a place engineers and architects get to roam free and experiment without meddling and micromanagement, even if constrained by a limited budget.
I'd also recommend Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed[0] by Ben Rich.[1] Rich was the second director of Lockheed's Skunk Works and protégé of its founder and famed aerodynamicist Kelly Johnson.[2]
The book covers the creation of the U-2 spy plane, SR-71 Blackbird, F-117 Nighthawk, stealth technology in general, and talks a bit about the F-22 Raptor. I'd recommend the book even if you're not super into aerospace or defense tech. It's amazing what the Skunk Works was able to achieve with such a small contingent of dedicated engineers, technicians, machinists, and managers for so little when left alone to do what they knew best.
In my opinion, these days, the term 'skunk works' is all too often used to describe a company's secret R&D wing when it would be more appropriate to use it to describe a small walled off portion of a company with tenure, a place engineers and architects get to roam free and experiment without meddling and micromanagement, even if constrained by a limited budget.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B011M8DBI6
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Rich_(engineer)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Johnson_(engineer)