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The rise and fall of the industrial R&D lab

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Re: The rise and fall of the industrial R&D lab

#21

Post by fuzzfactor »

wbl wrote: post #18
fuzzfactor wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Science takes time. Time is money on different terms for different people. So science costs money. How much science would you like? >the tension between managing scientists with their own pure research goals in such a way that they produce something commercially viable, while still leaving them enough latitude to make important leaps, seems huge. But these problems were always there in the model. What is harder to id…

Inflation doesn't change the value of an investment. It increases the price that the new products fetch as well. You need to look at rates when trying to explain this, and rates and inflation have been low for decades without a return to major industrial R&D.

I remember watching as it died a painful death not without dismemberment, and as we have seen there have been no rates capable of bringing it back to life since.

Inflation occurred after people had been made too poor to even continue some projects, much less start new ones.

Everyone who really made the big science possible never got rich enough to do it again.

Even NASA.

Re: The rise and fall of the industrial R&D lab

#22

Post by amgreg »

Bob Metcalfe, self professed “conservative hippie,” inventor of the Ethernet, founder of 3Com, of Xerox Parc fame, has this to offer:

> One of the few things that government should do is finance research, because — I have learned from many years — the only companies that can afford to do research are monopolies. Real companies cannot afford to do research other than monopolies. And there are some famous ones. The telephone monopoly — Bell Labs. The computer monopoly — Watson Labs. The copier monopoly — Xerox Parc. And on it goes. In retrospect the monopolies aren't worth it for the research they do. It's nauseating how much we hear about how cool Bell Labs was, but other than the transistor and Unix and the princess telephone, what did we get for all that money? And then for years AT&T as a monopoly sat on innovation — and IBM after that, and Xerox after that — it's just not worth it, so let's kill those monopolies. And if we need research, have it done at research universities. And the other spin I would offer there: as a practitioner of technological innovation, I worry about technology transfer — how do you get technology transferred from the lab into the marketplace. And the best way to do that is with people; and it is the business of universities to graduate people. So let's do our research there, and I think the ARPANet is a great example where government financed the research.

Source: https://youtu.be/zKz07DdaKzw?t=3772

Re: The rise and fall of the industrial R&D lab

#23

Post by criddell »

raverbashing wrote: post #15

Buying off-the-shelf technology works if you want the cookie-cutter solution (which, don't get me wrong, is fine for a lot of things) Now, newsflash for the MBAs, if you just sell the same thing as everybody else, you're just competing on price (and maybe marketing/sales channel). Otherwise you need to get your hands dirty. (Though apparently there's still money in dropshipping to be made, until people realize everyt…

> Now, newsflash for the MBAs, if you just sell the same thing as everybody else, you're just competing on price (and maybe marketing/sales channel).

You don't think MBAs know this?

Re: The rise and fall of the industrial R&D lab

#24

Post by criddell »

amgreg wrote: post #22

Bob Metcalfe, self professed “conservative hippie,” inventor of the Ethernet, founder of 3Com, of Xerox Parc fame, has this to offer: > One of the few things that government should do is finance research, because — I have learned from many years — the only companies that can afford to do research are monopolies. Real companies cannot afford to do research other than monopolies. And there are some famous ones. The tel…

I just finished reading Mitchell Waldrop's book The Dream Machines which is largely about J.C.R. Licklider and it has a lot of stories about the things Metcalfe is talking about during the 60's and 70's and into the 80's. It's a long, detailed book and I recommend it.

After finishing the book it made me feel like progress has slowed tremendously. Look at the changes from 1960 to 1970 or from 1970 to 1980 and compare that to 2010 to 2020. The last decade produced lots of incremental improvements but where are the giant technological shifts?

I was born in 1970 and if I look back over my life, the giant change was going from a non-networked world to a networked world. I think it's similar to how my grand parents could remember the world before and after commercial flight or how my great-grandmother remembered the arrival of automobiles.

I wonder what it is my kids will point to 40 years from now. A colony on the moon or Mars maybe?

Re: The rise and fall of the industrial R&D lab

#25

Post by Ozzie_osman »

> No one is quite sure why the lab model failed. It’s obvious that a scenario where Xerox is paying scientists to do research that ultimately mostly benefits other firms, potentially even competitors that help to put it out of business, could never survive.

I don't agree with this. The lab companies had gotten really good at attracting some of the smartest people (in academia and elsewhere), designing models to motivate them to invent while giving them tremendous latitude, and then profiting from their discoveries.

See people like Wallace Carothers[1], a chemist that DuPont hired out of Harvard and let him run a lab. He ended up inventing nylon which was obviously tremendously profitable for DuPont. So the model did work.

I don't have data for this, but I think what actually happened was just a lot more short-termism as investors, companies, and executives focused more and more on short-term profits, so large recurring R&D expenses that might require longer horizons to recoup investments made less sense.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallace_Carothers#Move_to_DuPo...

Re: The rise and fall of the industrial R&D lab

#26

Post by rowanG077 »

amgreg wrote: post #22

Bob Metcalfe, self professed “conservative hippie,” inventor of the Ethernet, founder of 3Com, of Xerox Parc fame, has this to offer: > One of the few things that government should do is finance research, because — I have learned from many years — the only companies that can afford to do research are monopolies. Real companies cannot afford to do research other than monopolies. And there are some famous ones. The tel…

It sounds almost comical. "Other than the transistor". The transistor is one of the most important inventions humanity ever made.

Re: The rise and fall of the industrial R&D lab

#27

Post by jjcon »

amgreg wrote: post #22

Bob Metcalfe, self professed “conservative hippie,” inventor of the Ethernet, founder of 3Com, of Xerox Parc fame, has this to offer: > One of the few things that government should do is finance research, because — I have learned from many years — the only companies that can afford to do research are monopolies. Real companies cannot afford to do research other than monopolies. And there are some famous ones. The tel…

In the US at least (less so here in the EU) a ton of scientific research is funded and performed with funds earmarked for national security, health and defense (often just called the military budget). That money goes to way more than just pure military though.

Re: The rise and fall of the industrial R&D lab

#28

Post by one_electron »

criddell wrote: post #24
amgreg wrote: post #22

Bob Metcalfe, self professed “conservative hippie,” inventor of the Ethernet, founder of 3Com, of Xerox Parc fame, has this to offer: > One of the few things that government should do is finance research, because — I have learned from many years — the only companies that can afford to do research are monopolies. Real companies cannot afford to do research other than monopolies. And there are some famous ones. The tel…

I just finished reading Mitchell Waldrop's book The Dream Machines which is largely about J.C.R. Licklider and it has a lot of stories about the things Metcalfe is talking about during the 60's and 70's and into the 80's. It's a long, detailed book and I recommend it. After finishing the book it made me feel like progress has slowed tremendously. Look at the changes from 1960 to 1970 or from 1970 to 1980 and compare…

genuine question (asking because i have a biased perspective): why dont you consider advances in ai to be a major shift? in the past decade, there has been a rapid increase in capabilities in computer vision, language understanding, robotics, etc.

Re: The rise and fall of the industrial R&D lab

#29

Post by [deleted] »

amgreg wrote: post #22

Bob Metcalfe, self professed “conservative hippie,” inventor of the Ethernet, founder of 3Com, of Xerox Parc fame, has this to offer: > One of the few things that government should do is finance research, because — I have learned from many years — the only companies that can afford to do research are monopolies. Real companies cannot afford to do research other than monopolies. And there are some famous ones. The tel…

[deleted]

Re: The rise and fall of the industrial R&D lab

#30

Post by KKKKkkkk1 »

amgreg wrote: post #22

Bob Metcalfe, self professed “conservative hippie,” inventor of the Ethernet, founder of 3Com, of Xerox Parc fame, has this to offer: > One of the few things that government should do is finance research, because — I have learned from many years — the only companies that can afford to do research are monopolies. Real companies cannot afford to do research other than monopolies. And there are some famous ones. The tel…

Metcalfe offers a very interesting conservative perspective. The article IMHO has a more convincing conservative counterpoint:

Labs, compared to university researchers, also maintain a constant link with delivering value and, ultimately, profitability. University incentive, prestige, and funding regimes suffer from the standard problems around non-profits: if you’re not trying to make profits, what are you trying to do? How do you know that what you’re doing is socially useful? Working without a profit signal can lead to deeply broken incentives systems and extremely wasteful admin burdens that weigh heavily on productivity, along with research that is in no way tied to improving human lives. Some estimates suggest that university scientists spend just a third of their time on active research. Historically, labs have seemed less prone to this problem.

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