not your grandfather's R&D

[TetsuoShima]

I wasn't sure where to place this, since it holds a little of everything...

 

It is Jon Stokes' (the cpu 'guru') comparative thoughts on current/old research, their applications and how businesses used to and currently operate.

 

imo this article has a lot of meaning to it and it is definately worth a read. It doesn't really answers questions, but it does offer some nice perspectives on businesses and technology.

 

AT&T Labs vs. Google Labs: not your grandfather's R&D

 

The Cold War, with its "Pentagon socialism", combined with large corporate monopolies that were expected to provide lifetime employment and pensions, made for something of a golden age for American technological innovation....

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The great labs of this era—Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, and IBM's labs—were places with massive budgets, where the world's top scientists were invited to pursue "blue sky" research into areas with no immediately apparent commercial applications. The facilities were state-of-the-art, and there was no pressure from management or shareholders to do anything but science for science's sake....

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You might think of these private and public laboratories, with their hordes of young, energetic PhDs and blue-sky research programs, as producers of a kind of scientific capital....

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It's no coincidence that many of those who went on to lead the information revolution were dropouts from either PhD programs or top-notch undergraduate programs. Even those who finished their doctoral work didn't end up doing open-ended research at the new companies they either founded or joined. The information economy demanded go-getters who would put their energy towards turning basic science into marketable products, and that economy rewarded those who opted out of more traditional research careers with a mix of world-altering power and cold, hard cash. Thus many of the truly ambitious adjusted their career aspirations away from the blue sky research labs where their parents might have dreamed of working and focused instead on the new brass ring: the profitable start-up. Start-ups aimed not at producing scientific capital but at turning it into technological wizardry, and from there into real money—or, rather, into stock value....

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In today's more agile economy, where workers hop from job to job and businesses spring up from nowhere to dominate an industry in the span of half a decade, there's no longer anything in the private sector like the enduring safety of the Ma Bell monopoly to lavishly support a blue sky research lab. The closest we have today is Google's "20 percent time," where engineers are encouraged to spend 20 percent of their time working on whatever research project strikes their fancy. But 20 percent isn't 100 percent....

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There's no doubt that the information economy continues to create a lot of wealth, but I think it's fair to ask if it's also creating enough science to replenish the stock of scientific capital that it's still burning through. I think it's clear that chaotic, market-driven change is a good way to bring ideas quickly and efficiently from concept to profitable product. However, such a rapid churning of the institutional and cultural landscape ultimately may not be conducive to the kind of steady, expensive, long-term investment in fundamental research that produces the really big ideas that somewhere, at some completely unforeseeable point in the future, change the world....

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In sum, I worry that not only is the information economy not replenishing the fund of scientific capital that it inherited from the great Cold War-era research labs, but that new start-ups are being actively locked out of the market by means of patent and trade secrets litigation so that a combination of old and new interests can fight over what's left of the shrinking pie.

 

 

I've placed some extracts here, the full article has more depth to it and places some things in a better perspective.

 

If you're interested, have a read. If you have thoughts on this, please share them. :)