Lessons from history's greatest R&D labs

Jeremy from Answer.AI here -- Answer.AI is, to some extent, the subject of this article. Perhaps worth noting here that we didn&#x27;t pay the author, Eric Gilliam; it&#x27;s his independent analysis based on years of study of 19th &amp; 20th century R&amp;D labs.<p>I&#x27;m hoping that not only will Answer.AI be successful, but that Eric&#x27;s words in the conclusion will come to pass:<p>&gt; <i>&quot;If their USD10 million experiment works, it has the chance to spark a rush of emboldened researchers and engineers to found small research firms, leveraging the models of the once-great dragons of American industrial R&amp;D.&quot;</i><p>I&#x27;m happy to answer any questions you have about our experiment, and my co-founder Eric Ries (@eries) is around too. (Note that there are 2 Erics mentioned here -- that can get confusing!) By way of background, Eric Ries is the creator of the &quot;Lean Startup&quot;, coined the term &quot;Minimal Viable Product&quot;, and created the Long Term Stock Exchange, and I&#x27;m the co-founder of fast.ai, Enlitic, Kaggle, FastMail, and Optimal Decisions Group.

This makes me nostalgic for something that I never had and doesn&#x27;t seem to exist anymore, labs unburdened by either the red tape of government or academia, or alternately, the pressure for results and profits that many startups seem to slaved to. Is there a 21st century equivalent of Bell Labs out there somewhere? Asking for a friend.

I am a researcher working in an industrial research lab who is in the process of changing careers (with research being more of a hobby rather than something that’s subject to performance reviews) due to my disagreements with the short-term focus of upper management and the constant pressure to “deliver value” on a regular basis. This post from Answer.ai was quite timely for me, and I am rooting for the lab to succeed! We need more research institutions that are free from either short-term business demands or the “publish or perish” system of academic research. Such freedom will encourage more ambitious, riskier research that could potentially have a greater payoff for our field and for society in general. I hope that Answer.ai will prove to be a successful model that balances business concerns with the risk-taking and exploration that comes with great research. If Answer.ai is successful, this will give me hope in the future of long-term research.

As some of you probably know, I spent a number of years working with GE, which included plenty of time at the legendary GE Research lab in Niskayuna. So it was a special thrill to see this piece connecting Answer.AI to the long history of R&amp;D labs. Our ideas about R&amp;D are kind of out of fashion in our current age, but I hope this says more about the age than it does about the quality of the ideas. Happy to answer questions in this thread, if there are any fellow R&amp;D-lab-enjoyers here.

@Jeremy, have you ever encountered Ken Stanley’s book “Why Greatness Cannot be Planned: The Myth of the Objective”?<p>If you’re not familiar with him, he was the guy that invented the NEAT algorithm, Novelty Search, etc.<p>In his book he talks about stepping stones and following what’s “interesting” to individuals. It seems like Answer.AI is focused on applied engineering, but any thoughts on this type of approach from a Research perspective?

The classic on the early electrical manufacturers is &quot;The electrical manufacturers 1875-1900&quot;.[1] This is the Harvard Business School take on Edison. The business plan for his first power plant is in there. (He way underestimated the payback period, but it was only a few years, so it worked out.) There&#x27;s also &quot;Men and Volts&quot;[2], a history of the early days of General Electric. Which, I think, is where this article got their info on tungsten.<p>The big corporate labs were part of far larger manufacturing companies. It&#x27;s not clear that a standalone lab can function in the same way.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.degruyter.com&#x2F;document&#x2F;doi&#x2F;10.4159&#x2F;harvard.9780674423640&#x2F;html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.degruyter.com&#x2F;document&#x2F;doi&#x2F;10.4159&#x2F;harvard.97806...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;menandvoltsstory00hammrich" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;menandvoltsstory00hammrich</a>

The best of luck to you guys, and excellent article by Eric. I recently came across his freaktales.com site, and was delighted to find another fan of the bygone age of R&amp;D.<p>We also just launched Unbelievable Labs (unbelievablelabs.com), with the ambition to combine Physics-oriented venture building with applied research. It would be great to form a network of these to emulate some of the scale that Bell Labs had due to monopoly funding.

“At first sight, when one comes upon it in its surprisingly rural setting, the Bell Telephone Laboratories’ main New Jersey site looks like a large and up-to-date factory, which in a sense it is. But it is a factory for ideas, and so its production lines are invisible.” — Arthur C. Clarke, science fiction writer, in his 1958 book, Voice Across the Sea.

Eric&#x27;s depiction of Edison and his rapid experimentation sounds very similar to the descriptions of one of Edison&#x27;s contemporaries, Luther Burbank, as told in <i>The Garden of Invention</i> by Jane S. Smith. I recommend this book to the author (if he hasn&#x27;t already read it himself) as I do to anybody else who enjoyed his essay.<p>There&#x27;s a lot to be said for just exploring the combinatorial space of possibility in even a naive or brute force manner.

&gt; Legally, Answer.AI is a company. But in practice, it might hover somewhere between a lab and a normal “profit-maximizing firm” — as was the case with Edison’s lab. The founders seem perfectly content to pursue high-risk projects that might lead to failures or lack of revenue for quite a while. In saying this, I do not mean to imply they are content to light money on fire doing research with no chance of a return. Rather, they hope to fund a body of research projects that ideally have positive ROI in the long term. They are just not overly concerned with short-term revenue creation.<p>This may be the biggest weakness. One things the greatest R&amp;D labs had was a big cash cow that paid the bills. Bell Labs was funded by AT&amp;T’s massive phone monopoly. PARC was funded by Xerox’ massive business. Lockheed Martin’s Skunkworks were paid by massive DoD contracts.

What service was used to create the Ai voice? It&#x27;s one of the first I&#x27;ve heard that sounds pleasant and life like.

The name is bad and the name is everything in tech. I thought it was some answers.com AI spinoff. This is far too generic and a google search of it is a nightmare. You don&#x27;t buy your books on books.com, you buy them on amazon.com, you don&#x27;t buy your pet supplies on pets.com, you buy them on chewy.com.