Bell labs, Xerox park, etc were AFAIK were mostly privately funded research labs that existed for decades and churned out patents that may as well have been money printers. When AT&T (Bell Labs) was broken up, that research all but started the modern telecom and tech industry, which is now something like 20%+ of the stock market. If you attribute even a tiny fraction of that to Bell Labs it’s enough to fund another 1000 times over.
The missing piece arguably is executive teams with a 25 year vision instead of a 25 week vision, AND the institutional support to see it through; cost cutting is in fashion with investors too. Private equity is in theory well positioned to repeat this elsewhere, but for reasons I don’t entirely understand has become too short sighted and/or has significantly shortened horizons on returns. IBM, Qualcom, TSMC, ASML, and Intel all seem to have research operations of that same near-legendary caliber, mostly privately funded (albeit treated as a national treasure of strategic importance); what they have in common of course, is they’re all tech. Semiconductor fabrication is extremely research intensive and world class R&D operations are table stakes just to survive to the next process node.
Maybe a good followup question is why hasn’t this model spread outside of semiconductors and tech? Is a functional monopoly a requirement for the model to work? (ASML has a functional monopoly on leading edge photo-lithography machines that power modern semiconductor fabs). Do these labs ever start independently without a clear lineage to 100 billion+ dollar govt research initiatives? Electronics and tech is probably many trillions in US govt funding since WWII once you include military R&D and contracts.
Bell labs, Xerox park, etc were AFAIK were mostly privately funded research labs that existed for decades and churned out patents that may as well have been money printers. When AT&T (Bell Labs) was broken up, that research all but started the modern telecom and tech industry, which is now something like 20%+ of the stock market. If you attribute even a tiny fraction of that to Bell Labs it’s enough to fund another 1000 times over.
The missing piece arguably is executive teams with a 25 year vision instead of a 25 week vision, AND the institutional support to see it through; cost cutting is in fashion with investors too. Private equity is in theory well positioned to repeat this elsewhere, but for reasons I don’t entirely understand has become too short sighted and/or has significantly shortened horizons on returns. IBM, Qualcom, TSMC, ASML, and Intel all seem to have research operations of that same near-legendary caliber, mostly privately funded (albeit treated as a national treasure of strategic importance); what they have in common of course, is they’re all tech. Semiconductor fabrication is extremely research intensive and world class R&D operations are table stakes just to survive to the next process node.
Maybe a good followup question is why hasn’t this model spread outside of semiconductors and tech? Is a functional monopoly a requirement for the model to work? (ASML has a functional monopoly on leading edge photo-lithography machines that power modern semiconductor fabs). Do these labs ever start independently without a clear lineage to 100 billion+ dollar govt research initiatives? Electronics and tech is probably many trillions in US govt funding since WWII once you include military R&D and contracts.