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Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Churn and burn R&D?

Source: ArsTechnica

Jon Hannibal Stokes has a great think piece about the legacy and future of R&D. He says it's easy to make fun of those old dinosaurs at AT&T and Xerox labs. But those were the labs that lavishly funded blue-sky research that gave rise to little things like the Internet and the transistor. The information economy almost never funds blue-sky research - Google is unique in granting engineers 20% time. Today's R&D is fueled by the boardroom and the marketing department - read commercial viability. Stokes says it's fair to ask if our economy is therefore "creating enough science to replenish the stock of scientific capital that it's still burning through." It takes steady, expensive, long-term fundamental research to produce the really big ideas that change the world. Are we just churning our existing institutional and cultural landscape and not feeding it with enough truly breakthrough innovation?