The rise and fall of the industrial R&D lab

At the same time, the cultural rise of tech startups has encouraged corporate R&D heads to farm out much of their interest in cutting edge tech to underwrite those startups from afar. By investing in startups from funds separate from mainstream R&D, it's easier to lay blame for failures outside the internal R&D organization.

I've worked in big pharma R&D for 15 years and gov't/military R&D for 20 years before that. Increasingly I see the forms of R&D diversifying and extending outside the org's primary lab, just as 100% of DARPA projects are fielded external to the DoD labs. As external R&D investments and partnerships rise, it's little wonder that primary R&D labs shrink and their focus shifts to better serve short term RoI like improving / debugging internal processes and inefficiencies.

This point illustrates that human benefits and profit do not always align. If we want to focus more on making things that benefit humanity, we have change our system that runs off of profit.

Firstly, it's not clear the industrial R&D lab has actually fallen. The article starts to engage with this at the end but doesn't really do so properly. It's easy to find examples of firms doing large scale expensive R&D:

- Many firms making big investments in AI

- Self driving cars

- SpaceX reusable rockets, plus all the other Musk firms

- Advanced database technologies (e.g. at Microsoft, Google, Amazon)

- Advanced compiler R&D (Oracle/GraalVM)

- The huge sums thrown around in pharma R&D

- Advanced graphics R&D is driven primarily by video game firms

- Intel/AMD/ARM/etc in CPU tech

- Tons of R&D in oil and gas

and those are just examples we're most familiar with. Are these firms running "labs"? No, not in the sense of Bell Labs. That's because this model is not the most efficient model available, and has thus mostly been phased out. Corporate R&D is much better integrated with actual product development than the standalone lab model captures. In the most successful cases we don't even really perceive it as an R&D lab because the entire company is doing R&D constantly, in a completely integrated manner.

Google is perhaps the clearest case of a company that has completely integrated R&D with its operations. There is an org called Google Research but IIRC it existed mostly for a trophy hire and isn't especially important: the bulk of actual research is/was done by product teams as an integrated part of their development process. There is no lab, yet at the same time, the lab is everywhere.

The second aspect is that it doesn't discuss the role of personality or personal visions of CEOs at all. Yet this is often critical to the decision to do R&D.

Why does Google research AI? It's not because it's an obvious, slam dunk move. Google has been doing ML research since the very start of the firm, but other search engine firms didn't. Why did Google research Google Glass? Or self driving cars? Google researches these things because Larry and Sergey thought it was cool. Page has even claimed in the past Google was founded specifically to do AI research (which isn't really right, but whatever).

What about SpaceX? Tesla? The Boring Company? Neuralink? These firms exist and do R&D because Elon Musk is a futurist. He doesn't do R&D for economic reasons, let alone for regulatory reasons. He does it because he wants to invent the future.

But this type of personality is rare. Our society is not kind to futurists. It doesn't really value them. They're seen as strange or dangerous; the story of inventing new technologies is usually a story of being attacked on all sides, by journalists or politicians or regulators or all of them at once. That's why most companies set up "innovation teams" - the exact opposite of the approach taken by the most innovative companies. They're little silos where people are taken and put in a corner, then told "go innovate". The non-technical CEO has no interest in the innovation team and likely never talks to them directly, let alone gives them direction or ideas. The team members know this and usually just mimic whatever trends they see around them (IoT, blockchain, AI, cloud, etc). Their projects are usually doomed from the start.

In the end, for research to be valued people with the power to deploy it must be excited by technology, not intimidated by it. And that isn't most corporate or government leaders today.

Of course this has all changed, with many companies not paying dividends. But saying that a company shouldn't return money to the investors through either buybacks or dividends is kind of ridiculous.

Mind clarifying this with specifics?