[TTPrograms]

Which Silicon Valley companies are pursuing the high risk R&D these days? I can only think of a few that are building high risk hardware (Theranos, some of the small photonics shops), and even many of those have proof-of-concepts already built in academia. Many of the medtech startups I've seen revolve around algorithms, which is kind of hard to compare in terms of risk profile to Bell Labs putting a bunch of researchers in a room to figure out how semiconductors work or needing a couple million to build a prototype.

When I think of R&D departments these day I think of non-silicon/non-electronic computing, lab-on-a-chip, and maybe some other medtech stuff. I'm under the impression that companies doing these sorts of things are currently a minority of "Silicon Valley entreprenuership".

[malchow]

Others here can better answer this than me. All I would say is that "5%-better-marketing-dashboard-optmization-platform" type companies get far more attention from the tech press than they probably merit. There is a lot of high risk R&D going on here: medicine, medical devices, transport, semis, crypto, and insurance, to name a few disparate areas.