After his studies, Goodenough was a research scientist and team leader at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory for 24 years. At MIT, he was part of an interdisciplinary team responsible for developing random access magnetic memory. His research focused on magnetism and on the metal–insulator transition behavior in transition-metal oxides. His research efforts on RAM led him to develop the concepts of cooperative orbital ordering, also known as a cooperative Jahn–Teller distortion, in oxide materials. They subsequently led him to develop (with Junjiro Kanamori) the Goodenough–Kanamori rules, a set of semi-empirical rules to predict the sign of the magnetic superexchange in materials; superexchange is a core property for high-temperature superconductivity.