The industrial research lab: a relic of the past?

Notes

nature materials, Vol. 5, May 2006, pp. 337–338, in the Commentary section (page footers read "nature materials | VOL 5 | MAY 2006 | www.nature.com/naturematerials"). The author is identified as at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California 90089-0281, USA. Noll's own bibliography, in the companion 2006 paper in this batch, gives the citation as Nature Materials, Vol. 5, No. 5 (May 2006), pp. 337-338.. Self-archived by the author at http://noll.uscannenberg.org/PDFpapers/Nature%20Materials%202006.pdf — Noll posts his own papers on his site at noll.uscannenberg.org, which is where this copy comes from. Hosting here is with his agreement, given to Bre Pettis directly on 6 October 2026. A two-page commentary arguing that corporate basic research is dying and that nothing else can replace it. Noll's claim is that large companies once funded their own fundamental laboratories, that many of those labs have closed or been cut drastically, and that what remains is aimed at short-term problems under pressure from quarterly profitability. He treats this as particularly dangerous in service industries such as telecommunication, where most revenue comes from service rather than equipment, so no manufacturer has reason to fund the long view and the service providers have not stepped in. He asks whether SBC, having acquired AT&T and decided to adopt the at&t name, will keep supporting the former AT&T Shannon Laboratory. For a materials-science readership he lists past Bell Labs results that paid off far beyond the phone network: flexible polyethylene to replace lead sheathing on cables, artificial rubber of strategic value in the Second World War, ceramics for missile re-entry cones, semiconductors and graphite carbon. He concedes industrial research was never purely disinterested — Edison, credited with inventing the industrial research lab at West Orange, ran it pragmatically on commercially useful problems — and treats that proximity to a company's mission as the model's advantage. He then rules out each alternative. Universities' prime mission is education, and peer-reviewed funding discourages genuinely risky work. Government labs serve the sponsoring agency rather than society. Consortium members grow suspicious of each other over proprietary interests until all lose interest. That leaves the industrial lab as uniquely suited to invent while guided by mission and secure long-term funding. The piece leans on William O. Baker, quoting his complaint that the annual cycle, report and budget dominate American culture and have obliterated reflective thought. Points of record: Argues industrial basic research has decayed into near oblivion under pressure from quarterly profitability, and that this is dangerous in service industries such as telecommunication; Lists Bell Labs materials results: flexible polyethylene replacing lead cable sheathing, artificial rubber, missile nose-cone ceramics, semiconductors and graphite carbon; Credits Thomas Alva Edison with inventing the industrial research lab at West Orange, New Jersey, while noting he ran it pragmatically on commercially useful problems; Questions the fate of the former AT&T Shannon Laboratory after SBC's acquisition of the company; Rejects universities, government labs and industry consortia as substitutes, each for a specific structural reason; Concludes the real challenge is articulating the importance of industrial basic research in an understandable and compelling way. People named: A. Michael Noll (author; Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California), Thomas Alva Edison (credited with inventing the industrial research lab, at West Orange, New Jersey), William O. Baker (led the research division at Bell Labs and advised many US presidents; quoted twice), Mike Wallace (interviewed Baker for the 1958 volume Second Rate Brains), K. Lansner (editor of Second Rate Brains, cited in the references). Noted: Reference 3 is printed as "Testimony of William D. Baker, FCC Docket No. 16258, Bell Exhibit 21, (dated May 31, 1966)" — the middle initial differs from the William O. Baker named in the text. This piece gives Baker's tenure leading Bell Labs research as 1955 to 1979; the companion 2006 telecommunication-research paper in this batch gives 1955 to 1973. Reference 1 is given here as Prometheus 21, 177-193 (2003), while Noll's own bibliography in the companion paper dates the same article to June 2002. The OCR of the opening paragraph is scrambled where text wraps around the headline, so the exact opening wording could not be verified.