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The death of corporate research labs

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Re: The death of corporate research labs

#171

Post by stainforth »

mmmBacon wrote: post #170

I’m not sure about the premise of the article but I do concur that startups have been largely unable to develop new technology and commercialize it until relatively recently. During the 2000’s if you were doing a “hard” tech company, investors did not have the patience to invest in these companies and allow them to grow. I worked at several of these startups, many with big VC names you’d recognize and they killed the…

We could also embrace the idea of government being the investor of first resort, and not leave it to the whims of VC.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/26/business/mariana-mazzucat...

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#172

Post by auxym »

captain_price7 wrote: post #166
take_a_breath wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think of what the Vision Fund could have achieved with this mindset. I’d love for a billionaire to offer 18-25 year-olds, $25k for a summer to explore new projects. You could fund 1000 kids with promising projects for $25 million. If the next great innovation will start as a toy, we need to encourage people to make more toys.

Isn't this what universities basically do with graduate students? They tend to be a bit older, the pay maybe a little less, but universities does allow pretty high level of freedom. Of course there are lots of problem with academic culture, like overemphasis on maximizing citation count. But the setup you describe will also require some form of simple metric to track progress- to ensure that 25k isn't going down the…

University research is strongly optimized to please grant commitees.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#173

Post by selimthegrim »

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…

HP?

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#174

Post by nine_k »

cannabis_sam wrote: post #139
enitihas wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, startups aren't going to magically make things cheaper than YouTube. So if any startups arise, they would follow a paid model most likely. Now that might be fantastic depending on where you come from. If you have disposable income, it is a huge win to have a non ad supported video platform which might even be more privacy protecting. If you are a poor kid using YouTube to watch MIT OCW and khan academy and innu…

If you are a poor kid, you upload your interpretation of a Bach piece and get slammed by an injust, extralegal pseudo-copyright mechanism, that’s in essence an attack on human culture.. MIT and Khan Academy could easily host their content using BitTorrent and reduce their bandwidth usage by 95% ( https://nrkbeta.no/2008/03/02/thoughts-on-bittorrent-distrib... )

Why do you think that a dozen of startups in the space remaining after a possible youtube demise won't be burdened by the same policies? I think that the copyright lobby would try their best to tighten their control at a time when a huge corp stopped throwing its weight against them.

What youtube gives to the poor kid is instant and free access to a huge audience. Yes, it's comes with an (admittedly not really high) risk of a false positive and blocking for copyright reasons. I suppose the kid is smart enough to also have copies of the performance on other services, and safely stored locally.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#175

Post by billme »

wegs wrote: post #160
billme wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the recipe? — (You have written a lot of words, no recipe.) Honestly, love research, would be happy to be wrong, but all I hear you saying is someone did it so it must be possible— that’s called survivor bias, it’s not a recipe and it would not double the global output of R&D for the next 10-1000 years.

There isn't a simple recipe someone can follow. A recipe is what brings you up to "industry best practices," and about where a typical business might perform. Excellence requires focus, dedication, thinking things through from first principles, having the right people in place, etc. The closest I can offer to a recipe is to hire a CEO / President / co-founder early on who has a track record of having R&D successes in…

To be direct: you literally failed to acknowledge my core point in response to your prior comment, that is what you’re describing is “survivor bias” — then went on in the comment I am currently responding to say a recipe is to fund, hire, cofounder, etc - the survivors. Recipe you provided was still based on survivor bias, at best an optimization based strategy — and would never double the output globally of R&D for any meaningful amount of time.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#177

Post by pharke »

enitihas wrote: post #128
_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…

> Imagine if Alphabet was broken up, Google search can still afford to run a research lab, as can youtube. It is far more likely that YouTube will go bankrupt, since running a free video service where videos are almost infinite and cache hits much lower is very costly. Couple that with all the other advantages of being with Google like access to talent and infra, I don't see YouTube surviving with Google. It's possib…

Netflix made it and proved a market for paid streaming services. Google has bungled this again and again and is currently in the middle of pitting its ad revenue against its top content creators which will only wind up killing both. They've already demolished their recommendation algorithm in favour of just showing repeats of what you just watched so they can cover their ass. Creators are still using 3rd party services to get paid since almost anything can get you demonitized nowadays. Giant channels like JRE are jumping ship. Nobody wants to pay for YouTube Premium if all they're going to do is kick the legs out from under all the worthwhile channels and turn the service into Cable TV 2.0. All this means they've got much bigger problems than paying for storage and delivery.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#178

Post by take_a_breath »

theelfismike wrote: post #152
take_a_breath wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think of what the Vision Fund could have achieved with this mindset. I’d love for a billionaire to offer 18-25 year-olds, $25k for a summer to explore new projects. You could fund 1000 kids with promising projects for $25 million. If the next great innovation will start as a toy, we need to encourage people to make more toys.

I mean, isn't that what Peter Thiel is doing? Giving college age people $100k to drop out and do a startup? https://thielfellowship.org/

In some ways, yes. I was advocating for something a little smaller and tied a little less directly to commercial products.

More of a mashup of the MacArthur and Thiel Fellowships.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#179

Post by take_a_breath »

captain_price7 wrote: post #166
take_a_breath wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think of what the Vision Fund could have achieved with this mindset. I’d love for a billionaire to offer 18-25 year-olds, $25k for a summer to explore new projects. You could fund 1000 kids with promising projects for $25 million. If the next great innovation will start as a toy, we need to encourage people to make more toys.

Isn't this what universities basically do with graduate students? They tend to be a bit older, the pay maybe a little less, but universities does allow pretty high level of freedom. Of course there are lots of problem with academic culture, like overemphasis on maximizing citation count. But the setup you describe will also require some form of simple metric to track progress- to ensure that 25k isn't going down the…

==But the setup you describe will also require some form of simple metric to track progress- to ensure that 25k isn't going down the drain.==

Maybe. I don't think MacArthur tracks the spending of their Fellowship (a much larger amount).

==According to the foundation's website, "the fellowship is not a reward for past accomplishment, but rather an investment in a person's originality, insight, and potential". The current prize is $625,000 paid over five years in quarterly installments. This figure was increased from $500,000 in 2013 with the release of a review of the MacArthur Fellows Program. Since 1981, 942 people have been named MacArthur Fellows, ranging in age from 18 to 82. The award has been called "one of the most significant awards that is truly 'no strings attached'".==

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacArthur_Fellows_Program

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#180

Post by jimktrains2 »

scarface74 wrote: post #113
netcan wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 spac…

Is the Space Shuttle really a great example? Two of the five exploded killing people and it ended up being more expensive and less efficient than the non reusable Russian equivalent. https://gizmodo.com/the-space-shuttle-was-a-beautiful-but-te...

Is explode the right verb for Columbia?

Also, it's not as though the Russians and Soviets didn't have their share of in-flight fatalities as well.

The shuttle was capable of missions that wouldn't have otherwise been possible. It also ferried more people at once.

That said, the shuttle was severely underutilized and hence costed a lot more than it should have.

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