When you read \u201cIndustrial R&D Labs\u201d in the title, what did you think of? Even in our field, there are plenty. There\u2019s Xerox\u2019s PARC, AT&T\u2019s Bell Labs, and IBM\u2019s Thomas J Watson Research Center to name just three of the most famous. But if you\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n
Now they\u2019re 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\u2014sort of\u2014but, of course, the truth is more complicated than the conventional wisdom.<\/p>\n
Over at Work in Progress<\/a>, Ben Southwood has an interesting article that considers The rise and fall of the industrial R&D lab<\/a>. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n I consider Bell Labs one of the jewels of the American nation and mourn its loss. I don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n The article is worth a read if you\u2019re interested in this sort of thing. It will help you understand why the big labs died and why, perhaps, they\u2019re coming back.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When you read \u201cIndustrial R&D Labs\u201d in the title, what did you think of? Even in our field, there are plenty. There\u2019s Xerox\u2019s PARC, AT&T\u2019s Bell Labs, and IBM\u2019s Thomas J Watson Research Center to name just three of the … Continue reading