Adaptive Secrecy in the Making of the Atomic Bomb: Toward a Process View of Secretive Innovation
通过二战美国原子弹制造的历史案例，研究保密在研发过程中如何动态演变，提出适应性保密模型，揭示知识共享与隐藏的平衡机制，对创新管理和组织研究者有参考价值。
Secrecy is critical for knowledge protection during innovation, but it can hinder knowledge creation. Despite considerable research into when and why organizations employ secrecy, our understanding of how secrecy is managed during the research and development (R&D) process remains limited. I examine how secrecy emerges, manifests, and evolves across the R&D process through a historical case study of the making of the atomic bomb in the United States during World War II. I uncover a model of adaptive secrecy, whereby practices of knowledge sharing and concealment evolve with changing tensions between knowledge creation and protection. Adaptive secrecy practices give rise to different types of uncertainty (evaluative, boundary, and performance) that are navigated through three types of adaptive disclosures: revealed concealment, revealing meta-information, and revealing contextual information. Through this process, organizations develop complex, multilayered secrecy structures with in-groups, out-groups, and in-between groups. I articulate feedback relationships between elements of the adaptive secrecy model and establish boundary conditions pointing to research directions on variants of this process. This study contributes a dynamic, microfoundational view of secretive innovation, develops the notion of out-groups and in-between groups within organizations, and advances the idea of meta-knowledge sharing in collaborative work. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.17687 .