Shoule R be Divorced from D: No and Yes!

Read "The rise and fall of corporate R&D: Out of the dusty labs" in The Economist of March 1st 2007. (Subscription required.)

The article subtitled "Technology firms have left the big corporate R&D laboratory behind, shifting the emphasis from research to development. Does it matter?" notes:

AT&T's Bell Labs (pictured above) earned six Nobel prizes for inventions such as the laser and the transistor. IBM picked up three, two from its Zurich Research Laboratory alone. And Xerox's Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) devised the personal computer's distinctive elements, including the mouse, the graphical user interface and the Ethernet protocol for computer networking (although it was criticised for failing to commercialise such leaps forward).

Now the big corporate laboratories are either gone or a shadow of what they were. Companies tinker with today's products rather than pay researchers to think big thoughts. More often than not, firms hungry for innovation look to mergers and acquisitions with their peers, partnerships with universities and takeovers of venture-capital-backed start-ups. The traditional separation of research and development enshrined by Bush in 1945 is rapidly disappearing, especially in the information-technology industry. Does this mean the days when companies came up with big breakthroughs are over, too?

Not necessarily. The approach to R&D is changing because long-term research was a luxury only a monopoly could afford. In their heyday, the big firms dominated their markets. AT&T ran the telephone network, IBM dominated the mainframe-computer business and Xerox was a synonym for photocopying. The companies themselves saw the cost of basic scientific research as a small price to pay for such power.

Comment: The article points out the merit of breaking down the old model that separated basic research from applied, and physically separated the scientist from the engineer and technology development.

The author(s) probably overestimate the separation that existed in the past. They are correct, I think, that there is an increasing recognition that science and technology are intimately linked, and the process of research and development has many close linkages and feedback loops;

However, there is a role for research simply intended to solve the riddles of nature, and historical experience indicates that very occasionally such research results in new knowledge that revolutionizes an area of technology, and thus of society. I value such research for itself, and the knowledge it creates as a "consumer good". We are fortunate when governments and philanthropies provide funds to such activities in adequate amounts that the revolutionary breakthroughs keep coming. JAD