Out of the dusty labs - The Economist

[applegrove]

Out of the dusty labs
Mar 1st 2007 | BARCELONA, PALO ALTO AND ZURICH
From The Economist print edition

Technology firms have left the big corporate R&D laboratory behind, shifting the emphasis from research to development. Does it matter?

"IN THE waning days of the second world war, Vannevar Bush, science adviser to President Franklin Roosevelt, penned a report that served as the blueprint for what would become America's enormously successful information-technology industry in the second half of the 20th century. With the grandiose title “Science, The Endless Frontier”, Bush (no relation to the current president) laid out a vision for government-funded science and engineering that would unite academia, industry and (this being wartime) the armed forces. This it achieved by, in effect, keeping them apart.

Under Bush's plan, universities researched basic science and then industry developed these findings to the point where they could get to market. The idea of R&D as two distinct activities was born. Firms soon organised themselves along similar lines, keeping white-coated scientists safely apart from scruffy engineers.

This approach was a stunning success. AT&T's Bell Labs (pictured above) earned six Nobel prizes for inventions such as the laser and the transistor. IBM picked up three, two from its Zurich Research Laboratory alone. And Xerox's Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) devised the personal computer's distinctive elements, including the mouse, the graphical user interface and the Ethernet protocol for computer networking (although it was criticised for failing to commercialise such leaps forward).

Now the big corporate laboratories are either gone or a shadow of what they were. Companies tinker with today's products rather than pay researchers to think big thoughts. More often than not, firms hungry for innovation look to mergers and acquisitions with their peers, partnerships with universities and takeovers of venture-capital-backed start-ups. The traditional separation of research and development enshrined by Bush in 1945 is rapidly disappearing, especially in the information-technology industry. Does this mean the days when companies came up with big breakthroughs are over, too?
.........SNIP"

http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8769863