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Comment by zheng | Hacker News Reader

I'd be willing to guess that you are more concerned with revenue because you have shareholders to answer to. R&D is something that doesn't show up on the bottom line with regularity. Sure, you might develop something huge and make tons, but probably not.

What would be interesting is to see some heavy quantitative studies done on the ROI of research in a corporate setting. If we could prove that R&D provides a decent ROI, I'd be willing to bet that the business types would be more willing to fund it.

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Teasing out returns on R&D would be difficult. Companies that maintain R&D teams (Microsoft, Yahoo, AT&T, Google, Intel, etc.) tend to be industry leaders, which complicates the relationship between research and income. Further, research projects have varying timelines and levels of dedication -- you can work on a project full-time for weeks, only to table it for immediate needs -- so the NPV calculation would be difficult.

I bet R&D departments benefit from economies of scale -- 5 PhDs can likely produce much more than one PhD at 5 companies, and a solid team attracts top talent -- which means the aforementioned big shots are the likeliest to produce meaningful research. Still, I would give a lot to work at a something like a "research startup."

Oh I agree, I don't know how you would go about it, and I'm sure it's not easy or it would have been done. Talking with someone who has actual experience in both research and ROI studies leads me to believe however that these companies have a pretty good idea of their research ROI, but that it is merely a hard sell to shareholders due to the time delay.

Microsoft Research seem very evaluatable (they routinely sell their work to product tems, and things like the algorithms driving the ad network from bing came out of MSR) in terms of the bottom line, and Google's research is so integrated with the usual engineering it's hard to know which is which (and hence I doubt it fares any worse than the rest of google in terms of contributing directly to the bottom line).

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