We Still Need Unfettered Research

Technology is at the center of the profound changes transforming our society, and is widely regarded as crucial to national and corporate success. The importance that even Wall Street attaches to good technology is shown vividly by the initial public offering of Netscape Communications, in August 1995. A company formed less than two years earlier, with total sales of under $20 million, an initial investment of a few million, and no profits, was suddenly judged to be worth $2 billion. The reason was that this company's main product, the Netscape World Wide Web browser, was marginally superior to competing products, and the market dominance it had achieved was thought to offer the potential to dominate Internet commerce. At the same time that Wall Street embraces the superior technology of companies like Netscape, and economists attribute at least half of economic growth to technological advances, there is great pressure on researchers to concentrate on shortterm projects. "Blue-sky" projects are out, and "mission-oriented" work with "focus on customers' needs" is in. What is perhaps most remarkable is that unfettered research is almost totally gone from industrial research labs. This type of research, in which little justification is required of individual researchers in the selection of their work, was the centerpiece of science supported by the U.S. government after World War II. The justification for it was that "scientific progress on a broad front results from the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in the manner dictated by their curiosity" (1). This type of research spread also to industrial labs in the 1950s and 1960s, but then was gradually reduced. It was never a large part of the total research effort (which itself was only a fraction of the total R&D work), but its decline is an indicator of changing attitudes and expectations for research. Directed research does not have to be short-term, or lack basic scientific value, as the discovery of the transistor at Bell Labs demonstrates. Also, customer focus can involve long-term work, as the development of Lotus Notes by Ray Ozzie and his crew shows. Still, the presence of unfettered research does imply an optimistic, long-term outlook and its absence is often taken as a sign of a lack of vision for the future. The story seems to be more complicated, however. I feel that the decline in unfettered research, and the more general tendency toward more directed and short-term work, is the outcome of a natural evolution of research. In particular, the accumulation of technical knowledge has made it easy to build new products and services, and so the most promising areas for research have moved away from the traditional ones that focus on basic components, and toward assembling these components into complete system. The Changing Environment for Research 1. Growth and fierce competition.--The last half-century has seen an unprecedented increase in research. While science and engineering have been growing for centuries, after World War II the rate of growth jumped. In most fields, there has been about a tenfold increase in the number of publications since 1950. This tremendous growth has led to changes in the nature of research. Increasingly, even in universities, large teams are required to achieve significant advances. Further, the competition is much fiercer, and it is hard for any team to stay in the lead for long. As an example, within weeks of the announcement of hightemperature superconductivity by the IBM Zurich research lab, several other groups had made major advances in the area. Thus, even if high-temperature superconductivity had developed into a successful industry, IBM would not have been able to monopolize the benefits from its invention. 2. Fewer big "hits."--While the research establishment grew, the number of big "hits" whose impact the public can appreciate, such as the Salk and Sabin vaccines that conquered polio, did not. …