Comment by blululu
3 years ago
You could write a book on this point. In fact a few have and they are worth reading.
someone at Bell Labs once remarked that 90% of staff worked on development (bringing research into a practical deployment). Based on that they estimate that development is ~10% more difficult than research. While works like Shannon’s or Bardeen’s or Pierce’s stand out, most of the work was devoted to deployment. Something academics and patents don’t cover.
So the modern equivalent might be Sunshot where the government recognises a certain area with potential like PV (sort of a Bell Labs innovation coincidentally) and then funds efforts to commercialize and drive prices down while supporting initial business in the field.
https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/sunshot-initiative
A decentralised, non-monopolistic Bell Labs for the 21st century.
Oh, just noticed it was announced by a Bell Labs alumni, Steven Chu, in his role as U.S. Energy Secretary.
This was basically the approach of Mozilla Research AIUI, which gave us Rust.
IIRC this talk goes into a lot of history there: https://youtu.be/9OHcJzJQ2Nk.
> You could write a book on this point. In fact a few have and they are worth reading.
If you have time, could you share some specific recommendations?
If I'm going to read one book about Bell Labs, with the goal of learning things I can apply to the current day, which book should I read?
> If I'm going to read one book about Bell Labs, with the goal of learning things I can apply to the current day, which book should I read?
The "Idea Factory" by Jon Gertner comes to mind. It is quite accurate.