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Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

If you look at the very successful research organizations they were basically funded by monopolies, hired a bunch of smart people, and allowed them to think long-term without quarterly or even annual pressure to produce.

Bell Labs and Xerox PARC are examples of this.

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And you know, government labs, which have generated more than a few Nobels, had a lot in similarity with these monopoly-created private sector labs, I mention them because we are at a time when the government of the US doesn't seem to understand that these labs have value.

Government labs are valuable but what made industrial labs even more valuable was that they were tied to companies that were deploying these technologies and thus had clearer missions. That’s a key distinction between Bell Labs and the DOE labs.

What the government potentially offers more paths to opportunity and success though, in that they do the research and then spin it out into the public sector to commercialize. So things that might not even get off the ground in the public sector get their chance and yet there is still a path for commercialization. That said, I’m sitting here a stones throw away from the national lab in Richland and I’m not sure why we don’t see even more innovation happening in the public sector here given the per capita number of phds, scientists and engineers here - my guess is we haven’t built the public sector infrastructure for it.

True, but AT&T and Xerox were kind of infamous for not capitalizing on what Bell Labs and PARC were creating. If you have either an iPhone or an Android phone you are using an OS based on UNIX and yet AT&T gets none of that money. If you are using Windows, Mac, or a graphical interface on Linux, you are using interface concepts created by Xerox, although likewise they "fumbled the future" (as a famous book about PARC put it).

Article's point is though that they shoveled useful and relevant problems at them. This is extremely clear if you spend some time reading the BSTJ or the phenomenal "The History Of Engineering and Science in the Bell System" books.

So while there were not significant pressures to produce products there was a culture of working on relevant problems or in areas connected to relevant problems. ... rather than going full open-loop gazing deep into the category theory of their navels -- which appears to be an occasional failure mode of academia.

In working with academics in niche areas there often is a thirst for applications-- like you've found some interesting idea but where to go next? What constraints need to be solved for to make this interesting property into something useful. Applications would be a good guide if anyone would provide some, but the connections often don't exist. Part of the magic sauce of Bell labs must have been this enormous science and engineering driven industrial corporation that could just flood real problems at people who needed them.

I have known of a hundred person organization that was supposed to do R&D and after six years produced nothing of value. I have seen a team of twenty launch a hardware product in a year. Purpose is important!

Solutions in search of a problem.

Rather than Problems in search of a solution, possibly related to this technology.

I'd argue that a concise explanation for these organizations having keen abilities to make great impact with their research is related to their participation in the golden age of "operations research" ... they had a plethora of real problems to solve, some of these being in a wartime environment, and collections of bright and capable engineers/scientists/mathemeticians/physicists/etc that were motivated to solve those problems.

They were also allowed to explore areas where they reasonably believed value might exist without being forced to ship quarterly or being forced to pursue and sell their pursuit of what would be sexy to investors

have you read The Idea Factory and is it any good or is it just a pop-history of the place?

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