Outsource R&D but lose touch with creativity
I picked up two themes around the R&D and jobs being outsourced within a couple of days.
the Economist ran a briefing on Corporate R&D and then I picked up this Network World article on IBM’s Böblingen laboratory which is being staffed up not relocated.
The Economist summarises the history of R&D thus..
In the waning days of the second world war, Vannevar Bush, science
adviser to President Franklin Roosevelt, penned a report that served as
the blueprint for what would become America’s enormously successful
information-technology industry in the second half of the 20th century.
With the grandiose title “Science, The Endless Frontier”, Bush (no
relation to the current president) laid out a vision for
government-funded science and engineering that would unite academia,
industry and (this being wartime) the armed forces. This it achieved
by, in effect, keeping them apart.Under Bush’s plan, universities researched basic science and then
industry developed these findings to the point where they could get to
market. The idea of R&D as two distinct
activities was born. Firms soon organised themselves along similar
lines, keeping white-coated scientists safely apart from scruffy
engineers.
But this utopian existence is ending
Now the big corporate laboratories are either gone or a shadow of what
they were. Companies tinker with today’s products rather than pay
researchers to think big thoughts. More often than not, firms hungry
for innovation look to mergers and acquisitions with their peers,
partnerships with universities and takeovers of venture-capital-backed
start-ups. The traditional separation of research and development
enshrined by Bush in 1945 is rapidly disappearing, especially in the
information-technology industry………..Now the laboratory has to apply science to real and immediate concerns. Often the distinction between “R” and “D”
is blurred. For instance, a recent research paper from the laboratory
about the bonding of gold atoms smacks of pure science. But as
semiconductors move to the atomic scale, answering this sort of
question will solve production problems ten years out.
But John Seely Brown (former director of IBM’s PARC) has the last word
But the message from mammon is different. “When I started out running PARC,
I thought 99% of the work was creating the innovation, and then
throwing it over the transom for dumb marketers to figure out how to
market it,” says Mr Brown. “And now I realise that there is at least as
much creativity in finding ways to take the idea to market as coming up
with the idea in the first place. I would have spent my time
differently had I figured this out early on.”
Sounds like the opportunities for creative thought in marketplaces
where you can get close to consumers and marketers are the ones that
will flourish in the long term. Hopefully Böblingen will fall into
this category and continue to buck the trend.