"WHERE HAVE YOU GONE, BELL LABS?"

An article in this week's Business Week advocates spending $20 billion per year on basic research with the goal of creating future jobs. The interesting thing: they suggest that the most effective way to spend the money is not on expanding existing research infrastructure (e.g. universities or national labs), but rather by spurring the creation of new corporate research labs along the lines of Bell Labs.

The rationale:

corporate labs, collaborating with universities, are needed to shorten the path between discovery and commercialization. The alliance between DuPont DD and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology exemplifies this model: Funded by $60 million since 2000 to study biotechnology, biomaterials, and catalysis, the alliance is now expanding beyond bio-based science to include nanocomposites, nanoelectronic materials, alternative energy technologies, and next-generation safety and protection materials. Such an arrangement enables the corporation to leverage the intellectual capital of top universities. Conversely, the university's connection to real-world needs provides a quicker path to market testing and commercialization.

It's an approach that makes a lot of sense. Corporate research labs, because of their integration with a business eager to deploy their results, can do much more focused research than university labs with less knowledge of actual operating constraints. Good applied research often generates interesting basic research questions, and again corporate labs have the advantage of having a pool of basic researchers available to follow up on interesting leads generated on the applied side. Having basic researchers around would also likely make for more effective university collaborations.