Monday, August 12, 2002

"Morgenthaler Ventures venture capitalist and former Bell Laboratories researcher and manager Greg E. Blonder warns that U.S. technology innovation is currently in too poor a state to deal with the next technological crisis. Blonder argues that the dot-com boom has had a negative impact on long-term American research and development by turning many scientists, engineers, and even professors into entrepreneurs, and causing them to abandon projects and studies.[...] With few exceptions, IBM being one of them, large companies have been driven away from long-term R&D investments; funding from government institutions such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) flows smoothly only for short intervals; and academics not snapped up by the entrepreneurial spirit of the dot-com boom are doing less long-term research, because industry is outsourcing short-term projects to universities. Blonder says to remedy this situation the U.S. should allow more foreign scientists and engineers to emigrate to the United States." Being one of those foreign-born scientists, I could hardly oppose this proposal, but how would it encourage a longer-term perspective among research funders? Many researchers who left for industry in the 90s reasoned correctly that there was little difference between what funders were asking them to do and what they would do -- for higher compensation -- in industry. However, the tech industry's contraction is pushing some of the most talented of those people back (or forward, for those previously in big industrial labs) to academia. High-quality graduate student applications in computer science from North America also seem to be increasing. What's needed now is a new attitude to long-term research among funders, in the style of the DARPA of the 1970s and early 80s. 4:25:33 PM