| This type of article comes up from time to time, and is generally wrong on many points. * Corporate Labs are not for primary research, at least in the United States. In the U.S., any primary research is done at universities, developed from research to prototype and patent at NASA, and then licensed to a U.S. company to go to product. For non-primary research, prototypes are developed by corporations via grants from government agencies. * Bell Labs, before AT&T monopoloy breakup, was a special business case. Its funding existed in a game of legislation maneuvering. It is not an exemplar. * Think of labs as "tier 5 tech support, when the engineers are stumped". Most labs are holding areas for smart people to solve sudden business problems. For those who read the famous analysis of criticality accidents in non-military settings, you need some smart folk hanging around to prevent disasters. For example, Sun Labs had people working (forever) on some hopeful breakthrough. Howard Davidson, a failure engineer, was pulled off task when server boxes started breaking (paper washers being glued in manufacturing) or card connections started failing (silver substituted for gold). These were high impact problems not solvable by line engineers. Similarly Ricoh Labs had a day when everyone was pulled off to disassemble a large machine and figure out a feeding problem that had a hard solution. Intel keeps materials PhDs in the fab areas just in case something comes up that would slow throughput. * Many labs have reputations no longer deserved. I worked at PARC and found some teams made magic and others made bloat. Look at the short term results, meaning the past decade, to rate a lab. |