How Detroit’s ‘Hive Mind’ Created U.S. Auto Industry

May 9 (Bloomberg) -- Corporate jargon has now given us theterm “hive mind,” which expresses the belief that a group ofindividuals working in proximity can achieve a sort of criticalmass that will generate more and better ideas than an individualworking alone could. Many businesses in Silicon Valley seek tofoster this creative environment.

This isn’t a new idea. There have been plenty of suchplaces in U.S. history, including the Jet Propulsion Laboratory,in Pasadena, California, and the Manhattan Project, in LosAlamos, New Mexico. Perhaps the best example, however, wasDetroit, where Henry Ford was at the center of a hive mind thatencompassed an entire city in the last years of the 19th centuryand remade America in the first years of the 20th.