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The death of corporate research labs

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Re: The death of corporate research labs

#71

Post by AmericanChopper »

elcritch wrote: post #47
AmericanChopper wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just about everything in the article doesn’t pass a sniff test to me. Aside from the issue you mentioned, the article seems to be making the claim that we have less innovation today. Which just seems like a ridiculous claim to me. It also mentions “pervasive short-termism” as an obstacle. It might be in large public companies, but it’s certainly not in the private equity markets. Innovative companies have access to h…

Really interesting point regarding the many year unprofitable VC backed companies being almost a replacement form of corporate lab. Though most of those aren't pursuing "hard technology" equivalents to inventing transistors or the like. Well perhaps Quantum Computers at Google, but they don't seem to be pursuing that correctly. What are your thoughts on hard technology like that?

I think that moves the goal posts a bit. UNIX was one of the most significant products to come out of Bell, and that's still used today. My laptop, my playstation and all of the production servers I'm responsible for use software based on innovations, based on innovations, based on innovations... of UNIX. For things like microprocessor, display, storage, network, camera, microphone... hardware, all of that is still advanced via large corporate research, and it continues to be innovated to such an extent that we came up with things like Moore's Law to describe its' pace.

A lot of the technology I use at work is funded innovation. Linux (largely Intel), React (facebook), Rust (Mozilla - kinda), Golang (Google), Objective-C, Kotlin, Typescript... There's also a huge number of AI and some very well-funded self-driving-car startups. For hardware, it's unlikely that a startup is going to disrupt companies like Intel, AMD, nVidia, Samsung... but that's only because they're already innovating at such an impressive pace. But even those companies don't come up with all their own innovations. For instance, the technology in the new displays Samsung recently announced comes from a company called Nanosys, which has been funding reliant since 2001. Theranos also comes to mind, which while it was a scam, it was a very well funded one.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#72

Post by JackFr »

Barrin92 wrote: post #60
AmericanChopper wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just about everything in the article doesn’t pass a sniff test to me. Aside from the issue you mentioned, the article seems to be making the claim that we have less innovation today. Which just seems like a ridiculous claim to me. It also mentions “pervasive short-termism” as an obstacle. It might be in large public companies, but it’s certainly not in the private equity markets. Innovative companies have access to h…

> the article seems to be making the claim that we have less innovation today. Which just seems like a ridiculous claim to me. looking at econonmic growth it's extremely hard to deny. The years ca. 1945-1975 constitute an exceptional period in innovation far surpassing anything today, both qualitatively as well as quantitavely. (new marginal innovations in tech or pharmaceuticals today tend to be about 10-50x more ex…

The years 1945-1988 are exactly the years of the Cold War as well. It seems likely to me that much of our innovation did not come from corporate research labs alone, but from government and defense spending. And defense spending was not just bullets and band-aids, but also basic research. (My favorite example is the Lambda the Ultimate papers were paid for by the Office of Naval Research.)

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#73

Post by AmericanChopper »

Barrin92 wrote: post #66
AmericanChopper wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not surprising that the period that covers the invention of transistors, integrated circuits and microprocessors saw significant technological leaps. You can make the same observations about the periods when steam, gas and electric power came to market. What you're describing though is a small number of companies making significant technological leaps, not the quantity of innovation. People also argue that the i…

people argue that but it's not anywhere in the numbers (and even more importantly, in lived experience). The argument can be made that this innovation just lags the invention of the internet but that's kind of unfalsifiable and looks increasingly like rationalisation. One key difference is that inventions like the microprocessor or the steam engine are deeply fundamental. They're at the 'backend' of the chain. Intern…

But you're not describing the pace of innovation at all. You're just describing your own judgements about the value of modern innovations. What would COVID-19 look like in 1970? I bet there wouldn't be many people working from home...

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#74

Post by rubidium »

michaelt wrote: post #68
Barrin92 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the article seems to be making the claim that we have less innovation today. Which just seems like a ridiculous claim to me. looking at econonmic growth it's extremely hard to deny. The years ca. 1945-1975 constitute an exceptional period in innovation far surpassing anything today, both qualitatively as well as quantitavely. (new marginal innovations in tech or pharmaceuticals today tend to be about 10-50x more ex…

In the enlightenment you could make discoveries about lightning with a kite and a key, in your free time when you weren't working as a publisher or founding America. In 2020 you need 10,000 scientists and $9bn to build a hadron collider, and 99.9% of people won't even understand if your result is important or not. Are we less good at science now, given that we're spending far more resources for far less impact? Or ra…

The big problems in science can be solved by much smaller teams. LHC is just proving out the dominant paradigm. It’s not gonna help us understand dark matter and _that’s_ the real anomaly in the current physical understanding of the world. Crack that an you’re the next Einstein/newton or at least Planck/schrodinger/hooke.

There’s plenty of room for innovation in green energy tech, housing materials, ag science, etc... We’re objectively spending more to get those than we used to need to. And that’s WITH google and scihub! Something is rotten.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#75

Post by MarcellusDrum »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #35
ramraj07 wrote: post #15

I am curious what the author thinks about the same problem in pharma/biotech. On the one hand, they are kind of _forced_ to do research in one form or another to power the pipelines, so clearly corporate research is still alive there. However, given the pathetic track record the industry seems to hace, and arguably complete lack of any real innovation (almost all of the drugs in most pipelines are just antibodies or…

There’s a school of thought that CEOs don’t matter, or matter much less than we might have imagined. Further reading: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ceos+dont+matter&t=h_&ia=web

Did you just link a DuckDuckGo search query and call it "Further Reading"?

We know how to search, thank you very much. If you want to help us, you can link a specific book/article, and call that further reading.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#76

Post by mattlutze »

legitster wrote: post #34

Holdup. Lack of anti-trust enforcement is blamed (among other things) for the end of corporate R&D, but Monopoly breakup is exactly what killed Bell labs! 9 smaller companies weren't going to fund their own lab, and the only reason the lab existed was to find new markets to explore. In fact, nearly all of the examples of successful R&D labs came from corporations that so dominated their industry they put money into f…

Well, a lot of / most of deep machine learning breakthroughs are coming directly from research scientists at Facebook, Google, NVIDIA, (other major tech companies) or research organizations associated with them or their executives.

It's difficult for academic labs to keep up, actually.

Whilst modern economics and the startup model makes it easier for companies to let startups do the actual idea testing (and then buy up the successful experiments), there's a ton of companies that are still driving entire industries with their corporate-funded research.

We should also probably note that a lot of the funding for some very successful academic labs comes from these large corporations as well.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#77

Post by ramraj07 »

txcwpalpha wrote: post #32
ramraj07 wrote: post #15

I am curious what the author thinks about the same problem in pharma/biotech. On the one hand, they are kind of _forced_ to do research in one form or another to power the pipelines, so clearly corporate research is still alive there. However, given the pathetic track record the industry seems to hace, and arguably complete lack of any real innovation (almost all of the drugs in most pipelines are just antibodies or…

I think you’re really not giving L’Oreal the credit it deserves. It’s much more than just a lipstick vendor. Sanofi, Europe’s largest pharma company, has its roots in L’Oreal (L’Oreal previously was the parent company of Synthelabo, which used to be the #3 pharma company in Europe until it merged with Sanofi). L’Oreal also does research in things like methods to regrow human skin/hair, which aren’t on the same level…

Thanks for the context, but I suppose I just couldn't pass up on the poetic phrasing of "selling lipstick" a la Steve Jobs' "selling sugar water" phrase.

Point still stands though. Even most of my PhD friends often lack fundamental understanding of how biology works, and I find it hard to believe an MBA can ever catch up no matter how much training they get. I'd argue that in general it also shows - biotechs run by scientists seem to do the actual path breaking research just the same as in technology.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#78

Post by TheCabin »

_8j50 wrote: post #46
legitster wrote: post #34

Holdup. Lack of anti-trust enforcement is blamed (among other things) for the end of corporate R&D, but Monopoly breakup is exactly what killed Bell labs! 9 smaller companies weren't going to fund their own lab, and the only reason the lab existed was to find new markets to explore. In fact, nearly all of the examples of successful R&D labs came from corporations that so dominated their industry they put money into f…

It's not being too large that forced a split up but their anti-competitive practices and positions. The regional bells still were big enough to run their own research labs. Imagine if Alphabet was broken up, Google search can still afford to run a research lab, as can youtube. The problem I think is how easy it is for large companies to acquire smaller companies. It's how they expand or enter a market, they refuse to…

> My answer: you will suffer from brain drain.and reputation loss,when you buy a smaller company,consumers assume that brand is now dead.

Not so sure about that. Maybe if you read HN a lot, but I think most users won't even notice.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#79

Post by david_draco »

_8j50 wrote: post #46
legitster wrote: post #34

Holdup. Lack of anti-trust enforcement is blamed (among other things) for the end of corporate R&D, but Monopoly breakup is exactly what killed Bell labs! 9 smaller companies weren't going to fund their own lab, and the only reason the lab existed was to find new markets to explore. In fact, nearly all of the examples of successful R&D labs came from corporations that so dominated their industry they put money into f…

It's not being too large that forced a split up but their anti-competitive practices and positions. The regional bells still were big enough to run their own research labs. Imagine if Alphabet was broken up, Google search can still afford to run a research lab, as can youtube. The problem I think is how easy it is for large companies to acquire smaller companies. It's how they expand or enter a market, they refuse to…

> Imagine if Alphabet was broken up, Google search can still afford to run a research lab, as can youtube.

This doesn't make sense to me. Google search and youtube are just front-ends for Alphabet to make money through advertising.

If Alphabet truly was broken up, Google search and youtube would not be able to use google ads jointly in the same way, and they don't make money otherwise.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#80

Post by kalleboo »

_8j50 wrote: post #46
legitster wrote: post #34

Holdup. Lack of anti-trust enforcement is blamed (among other things) for the end of corporate R&D, but Monopoly breakup is exactly what killed Bell labs! 9 smaller companies weren't going to fund their own lab, and the only reason the lab existed was to find new markets to explore. In fact, nearly all of the examples of successful R&D labs came from corporations that so dominated their industry they put money into f…

It's not being too large that forced a split up but their anti-competitive practices and positions. The regional bells still were big enough to run their own research labs. Imagine if Alphabet was broken up, Google search can still afford to run a research lab, as can youtube. The problem I think is how easy it is for large companies to acquire smaller companies. It's how they expand or enter a market, they refuse to…

> My answer: you will suffer from brain drain.and reputation loss,when you buy a smaller company,consumers assume that brand is now dead. You become a cemerery of dreams and ideas. You become an IBM,HP,Xerox and AT&T. Once the damage is done it becomes nearl impossible to recover from.

Would Apple be a counter-example? Multitouch, PA Semi, Siri, TouchID, etc etc lots of Apple technology was acquired but nobody laments the death of those “brands”

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