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The death of corporate research labs

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Re: The death of corporate research labs

#201

Post by mattkrause »

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…

A lot of academic research is locked into a particular model where every project has to be doable by 1-3 main people, most of whom are "trainees", and produce a (positive) result in 1-3 years. It's not totally impossible to do other things, but the career incentives push pretty hard in this direction: trainees need 1st author papers, it's harder to fund postdocs after a few years, etc.

Proper staff scientist jobs would help break out of this mould and might even be more cost-effective by reducing churn in the lab and providing people with more guidance.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#202

Post by sorokod »

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…

I would argue that in a system where the content is "almost infinite" the average value of each content item is "almost zero". Cache hits stats could be interesting to see what percentage of the content is never watched.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#203

Post by jbay808 »

netcan wrote: post #95
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 spac…

He was wrong, although the space exploration pioneering that SpaceX may do (landing on mars, for example) seems more likely to be motivated by passion than by shareholder returns.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#204

Post by dadarepublic »

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…

This statement ignores the reason put forth by the authors of the research paper mentioned in the article - that anti-trust enforcement discouraged _mergers and acquisitions_ forcing companies to invest in research.

FTA: >Arora et al point out that the rise and fall of the labs coincided with the rise and fall of anti-trust enforcement: Historically, many large labs were set up partly because antitrust pressures constrained large firms’ ability to grow through mergers and acquisitions. In the 1930s, if a leading firm wanted to grow, it needed to develop new markets. With growth through mergers and acquisitions constrained by anti-trust pressures, and with little on offer from universities and independent inventors, it often had no choice but to invest in internal R&D. The more relaxed antitrust environment in the 1980s, however, changed this status quo. Growth through acquisitions became a more viable alternative to internal research, and hence the need to invest in internal research was reduced.

A good question would be, although there was a decline in these kinds of research labs, did the market make up for that decline though the current strategy of investment in entrepreneurs and startups?

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#205

Post by mhneu »

Hold on. Corporate research labs are _fundamentally different_ than academic research labs.

Why? Time horizon.

Companies will not fund research that has a more-than-20-year expected time to product. Usually, they won't fund things that will take more than 10 years to go from R&D to product. That's because of investment-- think about startups, what LP wants to put money in a fund for more than 20 years?

On the other hand, academic labs, funded by governments, often do work that pays off more than 20 years later. Think about Watson and Crick - their work on DNA in the 40s and 50s led to antibody drugs in the 1980s that are now being used widely today.

Bell Labs was the exception that tried to do long-term, basic research work, and its failure proves that corporate funding will eventually dry up for any long-term research. There's just no business case.

The US has the biggest tech and biotech economy in the world because the US government (that is, US citizens and US society) was smart to fund longterm basic research at the highest level in the world, building universities that attract some of the best talent in the world. Corporate research labs do more short-term work.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#206

Post by jbay808 »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #63
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…

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…

You're focusing on semiconductors but the same period saw a large number of new plastics, velcro, contact lenses, credit cards, the atomic clock, the orbital rocket / artificial satellite, the laser, the seat belt, fibre optics, the LED, and many other materials science breakthroughs.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#207

Post by bcrosby95 »

mkl wrote: post #142

Why aren't there blue sky research labs funded by curious billionaires? Xerox PARC's key computing inventions cost a total of US$48 million in today's dollars [1]. There may not be so much big cheap low-hanging fruit now, but there is still plenty within reach. Bezos could be doing this instead of or as well as Blue Origin (which he's been funding at US$1 billion/year [2]). [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/chunkamui/…

> Xerox PARC's key computing inventions cost a total of US$48 million in today's dollars [1]

This sounds like a form of suvivorship bias. If you know which research pans out it wouldn't be research. You need to also include the cost of research done by other companies that led to nothing or something less impactful.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#208

Post by jbay808 »

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…

The choice of New York drives some of this. Go to sleep in Shanghai in 1970, and wake up in 2020...

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#209

Post by kajecounterhack »

nl wrote: post #188
enitihas wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Google makes a $15B a year from YouTube. That pays for a lot of storage. And storage is very cheap at that scale. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2...

Cost of streaming videos is not storage, it's dominated by bandwidth. Bandwidth is expensive when you can't cache videos the way Netflix does.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#210

Post by michaelkeenan »

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/

Not just startups (though the focus might have shifted toward them in recent years, not sure). The Wikipedia article says that Fellows are funded to "drop out of school and pursue other work, which could involve scientific research, creating a startup, or working on a social movement".

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

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