When you read “Industrial R&D Labs” in the title, what did you think of? Even in our field, there are plenty. There’s Xerox’s PARC, AT&T’s Bell Labs, and IBM’s Thomas J Watson Research Center to name just three of the most famous. But if you’re like me, only one comes to mind: Bell Labs. One of the great disappointments in my life was that I never had the chance to work there.
Now they’re sort of like Pink Floyd: there are past members still active but the Labs itself is only a shadow of its former self. We all know what happened—sort of—but, of course, the truth is more complicated than the conventional wisdom.
Over at Work in Progress, Ben Southwood has an interesting article that considers The rise and fall of the industrial R&D lab. It’s long and a bit complicated but suggests that forces other than divestiture probably guaranteed the end of Bell Labs and others as the forces they once were.
I consider Bell Labs one of the jewels of the American nation and mourn its loss. I don’t think the smaller independent organizations that replaced it have the same ability to scale and opportunities for synergy that Bell Labs and the others had but Southwood makes the case that things are in some ways better now. And in any event, he says, the big industrial lab may be making a comeback as evidenced by, say, Google.
The article is worth a read if you’re interested in this sort of thing. It will help you understand why the big labs died and why, perhaps, they’re coming back.