Comment by bmitc

The national labs do pretty cool stuff, but I don't think it was as freeform as the original ARPA with Licklider and Bell Labs research. My understand is that the success of those programs where that they funded ideas and people and not projects. Nowadays, that is extremely rare, and for the most part, the national labs are highly focused on projects. There is not much speculative research on things that could fail. Really, the same goes for a lot of academia.

That's not to say that the projects at the national labs aren't interesting. They're very interesting, difficult, and challenging. But it would be nice if cells within them had much longer time-frames of ten years and beyond for transformational technology.

The other issue is that ARPA, Bell Labs, PARC Research, and the like were also catalyzed by their time. They were absolutely ahead of their time with the solutions they came up with, but the 20th century was ripe for the picking for transformational technologies.