Thursday, December 26, 2002

G.E. Research Returns to Roots. A team of researchers for G.E. are hoping to usher in an era of cheap, clean-burning lights, batteries, solar cells and the beginning of plastic-based electronics. By Claudia H. Deutsch. [New York Times: Technology] G.E. Research was one of the first corporate research labs to abandon longer-term work in the early 90s. It is good to see them recovering some balance. Corporate research is not only, or mainly, a source of patentable technologies. Its real main role is to encourage discovery, invention, and innovation in general, which create demand for new ideas and new technologies. Research investment is not a zero-sum game. Even if a company cannot benefit from all the inventions of its researchers, it it still benefits from the overall acceleration of technological development, which increases demand for new products and services, even relatively mundane ones. The 90s were notable for the run-away investment in exploiting existing technologies. Most of the over-hyped "inventions" of the period were simple applications of 20-year old technology. In the meanwhile, basic research was increasingly starved. Even federal research funding became shorter-term and more targeted. Not a recipe for sustainable growth. Unfortunately, the implicit social contract around long-term corporate research seems to be based on monopoly rents (AT&T until the consent decree, Xerox while it dominated copying, IBM until the PC breakout, Microsoft now). Could there be an alternative contract that supports longer-term industrial research for its overall benefits without relying on monopolies? 10:45:55 AM