[pm90]

Yes, its pretty sad to see the demise of industrial labs doing more fundamental research, but this might be related to the demise of the big corporations in general. The HN community understandably hates the bigger companies for being monopolies and stifling innovation and whatnot, but there are two sides to the story. A large corporation, with bigger revenues, can think longer term, and invest in basic research so as to promote efficiency and/or develop technologies to give it a competetive edge. I believe Bell Labs was invented for this reason: the exact story escapes me, but they asked a scientist to help them out with one problem, and then kinda realised it might not be a bad idea to have a bunch of these scientists around, just doing their research, to perhaps be occasionally available to help the engineers with the problems they face.

I do see a lot more cooperation between the Industry and University though. And as we enter an era of smaller corporations, the burden of industrial research might shift to consulting/academic sponsorship programs instead.

[danjayh]

I work for a megacorp. We spend a great deal of cash on self-funded projects to move the state of the art forward in our division's particular niche (avionics). We released a product ~6 years ago that fundamentally changed the computing architecture for modern airplanes (in this case, 787). I work with extraordinarily brilliant people who are given many opportunities to have their cutting edge ideas heard, funded, and executed. While we don't do a lot of basic scientific research, we do plenty of technological research on the absolute cutting edge of our discipline. From what I know of our other industrial divisions, they similarly do cutting edge R&D in their respective fields. I'd hardly say that my megacorp is stifling innovation (quite the opposite, actually). We do have tiny cubes, though :) (but hey - I agree that the money is better spent on R&D, so I have no complaints). I know that not all megacorps and their jobs are quite so awesome, but I can vouch for the fact that some are. As a side benefit, the airframer duopoly prevents distracting patent wars among subcontractors very effectively, leaving us with more resources to work on fun problems.