Comment by got2surf

My dad worked at Bell Labs in the 80s, and he's always telling me about the quality of the experience there.

I'm not sure if it was the politics, or the people, but he said there was an Apple or Google-like quality of innovation and inspiration. What's amazing though is that this innovation extended to basic research as well, and not just consumer products. He always tells me that when his team was using an early implementation of C++, a member simply called up Bjarne (creator of C++), and got an answer within seconds.

I agree with others about shifting research locations, but I think we have some fundamental problems with the attitudes of research. I've researched heavily outside of school for the past 4 years (thousands of hours, multiple publications) and the thing I've learned is that there's gotta be a better way to do this. Labs aren't the best place for industry and academia to talk to each other, because we'll always have conflicting motives.

Perhaps a move towards more technology incubation from university research - a Y-Combinator for universities, perhaps - is the future.