During Bell Labs’ heyday, it was the beneficiary of AT&T’s nationwide monopoly. AT&T was a monopoly subject to various restrictions by the US government as par

During Bell Labs’ heyday, it was the beneficiary of AT&T’s nationwide monopoly. AT&T was a monopoly subject to various restrictions by the US government as part of a series of legal cases. When a lab is part of a monopoly, whether it’s due to being a natural monopoly (like AT&T) or due to patent rights (Xerox in its heyday), it could lavishly fund labs that give its researchers large amounts of freedom. Such resources and freedom resulted in many groundbreaking discoveries and inventions. However, AT&T was broken up in 1984 as the result of yet another lawsuit involving AT&T’s monopoly. Bell Labs still remained, but it no longer had the same amount of resources. Thus, the lab’s unfettered research culture gradually gave way to shorter-term research that showed promise of more immediate business impact. A similar thing happened to Xerox PARC when the federal government forced Xerox to license its xerography patents in the mid-1970s; this, combined with the end of a five-year agreement where Xerox’s executives promised not to meddle in the operations of Xerox PARC, led to increased pressure on the researchers (though, ironically, Xerox infamously didn’t take full advantage of the research PARC produced, though that’s another story). Combine this with a business culture that emerged in the 1990s that disdains long-term, unfettered research and emphasizes short-term research with promises of immediate business impact, and this has resulted in the transformation of industrial research. There are some labs like Microsoft Research that still provide their researchers a great deal of freedom, but such labs are rare these days. It’s amazing that well-resourced companies like Apple don’t have labs like Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, but if businesses are beholden to quarterly results, why would they invest in long-term, risky research projects? This leaves government and academia. Unfortunately government, too, is often subject to ROI demands from politicians (which is nothing new; check out how the Mansfield Amendment changed ARPA into DARPA), and academia is subject to “publish or perish” demands. The running theme is that unfettered research with a proper amount of resources can result in world-changing discoveries and inventions. However, funding such research requires a large amount of resources as well as patience, since research takes time and results don’t always come in neat quarterly or even annual periods. Our business culture lacks this type of patience, and many businesses lack the resources to devote to maintaining labs at the level of Bell Labs or Xerox PARC. Even academia and government lacks this type of patience. The question is how can we encourage unfettered research in a world that is unwilling to fund it. I’ve been thinking of ideas for quite some time, but I haven’t fully fleshed them out yet.