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Adaptive Secrecy in the Making of the Atomic Bomb

The Second OHN Reading Club review - this time of Rohin Borpujari's Organization Science article

Stephanie Decker FAcSS FBAM

Feb 20

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And we are back with the second instalment of the OHN Reading Club. This time we are focusing on Rohin’s in-depth investigation of how secrecy evolves adaptively in organizations:

Borpujari, R. (2025). Adaptive Secrecy in the Making of the Atomic Bomb: Toward a Process View of Secretive Innovation. Organization Science. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.17687

It’s a long one. Because this is quite a big article. Enjoy!

Keeping innovations secret

It seems obvious that you want to keep a new product idea secret until it is fully developed. But that presupposes you know exactly what’s required and hold all the resources and knowledge in-house. The reality is that pathbreaking innovations exist in knowledge eco-systems that thrive on the free exchange of ideas. Again, this seems obvious, but that ultimately highlights the paradoxical nature of organizational secrecy in the innovation process.

This is the central theoretical puzzle for Rohin’s study of the Manhattan project. While he does reflect at the end of the article about the contemporary relevance of these issues for innovations, for example, in the AI industry, or potentially for quantum computing, this piece seems driven more strongly by its theoretical focus.

Not that the historical case of the Manhattan project is not covered in reasonably detail, rather, it is more clearly shaped by secondary historical literature. As a well-known, historically-significant, widely researched case it presented a logical choice as an empirical context for secrecy in an innovation context.

By Donald Cooksey (According to NAID record, but also recorded in Hewlett, Richard G.; Anderson, Oscar E. (1962). The New World, 1939-1946. Volume I: A History of the Atomic Energy Commission. The Pennsylvania State University Press.) - National Archives Catalog, NAID: 7665782archived, Public Domain, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19458041

For subscribers, we go through the template structure of a US-American management journal (again, as it is the secret sauce of panda kung-fu), the methodological moves and how the theoretical contributions are constructed...