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Where do new practices and models of organization come from? of course, nothing is entirely new, so the obvious answer is that new things trace their lineages back through earlier incarnations and to the careers of individuals involved in their construction. such tracing is indeed useful, but it can lead to either a frustrating, infinite regress, with scant analytical purchase, or undue attention paid to the “heroic” role of inventors, without sufficient consideration of the surrounding context in which their creations occurred. We pursue a different tack, focusing on components of new things and identifying the sources of separable parts, which can be moved, the title of this chapter comes from remarks by Genentech cofounder Herbert Boyer (2001, 95–96):“i think if we had known about all the problems we were going to encounter, we would have thought twice about starting. i once gave a little talk to a group at a stanford Business school luncheon, and i took off on the title of a book on evolution by Jacques Monod... Chance et Nécessité. the title of my talk was ‘chance, nécessité, et naïveté.’naïveté was the extra added ingredient in biotechnology.” We thank tricia soto, librarian at the center for Advanced study in the Behavioral sciences, and tanya chamberlain for assistance in finding archival materials. our thanks to the center for Advanced study for hosting Professor Powell while the chapter was prepared. Martin Kenney was most generous in providing us with the source documents he used in writing his 1986 book, one of the very first studies of the development of the biotechnology industry. We are grateful to Pablo Boczkowski, Matt Bothner, ron Burt …