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The death of corporate research labs

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Re: The death of corporate research labs

#251

Post by tehjoker »

tehjoker wrote: post #161

It's worth keeping in mind that Bell Labs existed because the government paid Bell to keep it open. I forget the precise agreement, but simply having the lab earned Bell money, it wasn't a cost center. EDIT: I'm looking for a reference for this. I saw an article that says it was funded with 1% of company wide revenues. This is undoubtedly true, but a graduate student I know that knows about such things says that a su…

I asked some people that were there and they said that Bell was a regulated monopoly and the government allowed them to charge an additional 10% to customers for investment. After competition and deregulation was introduced, things got increasingly more profit focused (as in research had to be justified on that basis). After the company broke up, there was some kind of cooperative lab between seven child companies that equally shared funding of it. However, that only worked well while they were prevented from competing with each other. Once competition was instituted, the companies started asking the lab to sell results to individual companies, and it went downhill from there.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#252

Post by mattlutze »

foobarian wrote: post #153
amelius wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

There is a spectrum of the kinds of research one might do. My advisor always used to remind me that if a team of good engineers at a big corporation can do something, it's not a good research problem to tackle for a grad student in a uni lab. So we naturally tended to more speculative/fundamental problems, which seems like a good thing - instead of trying to compete with industry labs we augment them.

This is how my advisor and I reshaped my recent masters thesis. I was thinking of an engineering problem, but he reminded me of some really cool ways we could do basic science. It ended up being really rewarding and still novel.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#253

Post by jjk166 »

michaelt wrote: post #68
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…

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…

> 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.

And yet those discoveries weren't made in the previous thousands of years during which people had been standing around in thunderstorms. The enlightenment represented a paradigm shift where a new innovation - the scientific method - was applied en masse for the first time and it led to revolutions in science, technology, and society. Whenever a paradigm shift happens, be it the practical steam engine or long range electricity transmission, you invariably have a lot of suddenly accessible low hanging fruit. The mid 20th century had a surprisingly large number of such paradigm shifting innovations such as solid state transistors, integrated circuits, jet engines, nuclear reactors, antibiotics, solar cells, the internet, lasers, credit cards, the list goes on. Entire new fields of science and sectors of industry popped up in a very short period of time.

We continue to innovate, but our innovations are mostly evolutionary and there have been comparatively few paradigm altering inventions in the past 30 years, especially when one considers how much larger the population of sufficiently educated and affluent individuals who could produce such innovations has become and how much easier it is for such innovations to be communicated. It is impressive how good we've gotten at picking higher fruit, but we should still be asking why we are struggling so hard to find low hanging fruit.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#254

Post by andrewla »

makapuf wrote: post #228
andrewla wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that there is no _free_ way of solving the YouTube problem. As for cheapness? We don't yet know what the space looks like because YouTube kills off its competitors by undercutting them preemptively. If we hadn't had YouTube all these years, by now there's at least a possibility that other approaches (ad-driven, subscription-driven, etc.) would have been explored for low-cost user-generated content, and we'd h…

It seems a competitor like Dailymotion was able to survive on its own, bar YouTube competition. I m not sure its viable with it, but without google it seemed profitable.

Eh, another venture-backed story with no road to profitability, handed off between various acquisitions and allowed to bleed money in the hopes of drawing business.

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#255

Post by makapuf »

andrewla wrote: post #254
makapuf wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems a competitor like Dailymotion was able to survive on its own, bar YouTube competition. I m not sure its viable with it, but without google it seemed profitable.

Eh, another venture-backed story with no road to profitability, handed off between various acquisitions and allowed to bleed money in the hopes of drawing business.

were you talking about facebook, youtube, google or dailymotion?

Re: The death of corporate research labs

#256

Post by andrewla »

makapuf wrote: post #255
andrewla wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, another venture-backed story with no road to profitability, handed off between various acquisitions and allowed to bleed money in the hopes of drawing business.

were you talking about facebook, youtube, google or dailymotion?

In this case, I was lumping dailymotion in with the others you mention.
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