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The death of corporate research labs

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Re: The death of corporate research labs

#91

Post by toshk »

kalleboo wrote: post #80
_8j50 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lament…

Where do we draw the line between innovation and new features?

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#92

Post by teleforce »

freyr wrote: post #54

Bell Labs and Xerox PARC are the poster children for successful corporate R&D labs, but I wonder if, to some extent, they were in the right place at the right time? The advent of modern computing and digital telephony provided rich soil for impactful research. I worked for a large R&D lab a while back after completing my PhD, but the organization turned out to be completely directionless. Funding went to snake-oil sa…

I think the largest corporate R&D lab at the moment must be Huawei. Last time I've heard from someone working there, they have more than 10K PhDs working for them and even only half of them working on R&D that is really massive. It also being helped by the fact its founder is an ex military R&D engineer.

The silver lining is that since doing R&D is necessary for progress and innovation, it will happen elsewhere. I foresee that the majority of R&D exercises will move to university and industry sponsored research will be the norm rather than the anomaly. This is also fueled by the fact that graduate students' stipends are much much lower. You did mention that in Bay Area the researchers are paid half of the FAANG senior engineers. In most developed countries, the salary of university graduate students probably a quarter (4x lower) of the company's researchers. The developing countries has the worst by being paid 10x lower than the BAY Area researchers.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#94

Post by OkayPhysicist »

rubidium wrote: post #74
michaelt wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..…

You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of how scientific research (especially physics) works. You take a model. You figure out some observable predictions of that model. You run an experiment to test that prediction. If it's right, the experiment stands as support to the model's accuracy. More importantly, sometimes the predictions are wrong. After a pattern of anomalies, someone comes up with a model that explains them. Rinse, repeat.

The idea that the "big problems" can be solved by small teams pontificating is missing all but that last step.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#95

Post by netcan »

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…

Very good points.

I think we (I, maybe) default to the mistake of thinking in terms of "one big systemic explanation." Ultimately, something like investment in or success at innovation doesn't follow strict rules. The factors that go into it tend to be local. Any practicable "Theory of Innovation" is likely to be true locally, at best.

A few years back Neil Degrasse Tyson, advocating for a re-funding of the NASA space shuttle, made the argument that private companies will never pioneer space exploration. Mars missions and such. He had Elon in his sights, but also others who were starting to "invest in space" at the time.

It was a good argument. It was logical, consistent with 50 years of space exploration experience and parsimonious with analogies from other industries, history, etc.

Neil was also wrong, and I think he'd agree to moderate that argument significantly today.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#96

Post by OkayPhysicist »

the_gipsy wrote: post #39

Have they ever been alive, though? They seem more of a PR stunt, to show shareholders that the company is invested in the future. In my country, if you land a job in such a lab, you know you can bullshit around and play with with some stuff. But nothing will ever come out of it. For profit, the corporation will acquire some product or startup. If you really want to innovate freely, found your own startup. With the ad…

Bell Labs basically re-invented electricity. The invention of the transistor was one of the most important inventions in history, on the scale of the dynamo, gunpowder, or fucking metal tools.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#97

Post by netcan »

elcritch wrote: post #42
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…

I used to think monopolies were inherently progress limiting, but as you point out it's a mixed bag. Bell labs was an amazing center of innovation even as AT&T stifled the telephone market. Not sure corporate labs could exist today with the self-defeating (and legally incorrect notion) that the primary duty of a public company is to make money for shareholders. That philosophy today would/will prevent large companies…

Ultimately, a lot depends on individuals. Incentives, systems, and such can make things common or uncommon, but innovation tends to be uncommon anyway.

Google was founded, and mostly run, by people with a pretty broad academic interest in science and technology. Pioneering ai breakthroughs is what they wanted and they find ways to make it logical for google to do. Both the existence and the nature of their R&D reflects that. Apple or Microsoft were not. They're interested in products. What rocks Zuch's boat is is reach. I don't think he'd be that excited about purely technological breakthroughs. He'd only be excited about ways these can extend FB's footprint.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#98

Post by VMisTheWay »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #85
kalleboo wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 lament…

I don't know what the current figure is but traditionally Apple's spending on R&D has been quite low for the size of the business.

Apple should not be used as an example of successful business practices. Not everyone can spin negativities into positives and have fans continue to buy their products.

Similarly I don't think there is much to learn from Jeep brand. Big sales, low quality, huge marketing budget.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#99

Post by NalNezumi »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #40
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…

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…

And I guess this is the reason WeWork and their kind is notoriously hated by many people; It sell itself as a "tech startup" while it is not.

"tech startups" seems to be synonymous with what the author call the "successors of corporate labs", and that seems to be why VC:s seems to be OK with pouring moneys for a semi-long term payback.

People/Companies that play this expectation (such as WeWork and Theranos) get the moral shaming from mostly tech people, while the rest seems to not get the point of the hate. (Not much indifferent from why some people do/didn't see the point of a corporate lab more than a cost sink)

Come to think of it, Company/CEO:s that overly focus on the "tech" image might be a warning sign that they might be just snake oil (such as Theranos CEO mimicing Jobs)

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#100

Post by Frost1x »

amelius wrote: post #87
mattlutze wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It's difficult for academic labs to keep up, actually. That's probably more an intrinsic problem with academia (lower wages, limited career opportunities, limited resources compared to companies).

And also an artifact of strategic choice of pursuit of these technologies.

Due to the resource and scaling requirements (as well as inherent skill needed), replication of efforts for expansion purposes is difficult and that's one reason (not the only reason) these sort of modeling approaches are being pursued.

A lot of technology choices are being chosen because of an inherent high barrier to entry, limiting competition risk.

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