‘R2-D2′ and Other Lessons From Bell Labs

By Andrew C. Revkin

Speaking of innovation, the LucasFilm licensee Nikko Home Electronics came out last year with an R2-D2 DVD Projector.

John Mashey, a self-described “ancient UNIX person” who worked at Bell Labs from 1973 to 1983, posted some thoughts about how the labs shaped R and D efforts and investment to raise the odds of breakthroughs that could improve society. They had a coding system — including R2, D2 — that Mr. Mashey describes below. [UPDATE 12/13: Mr. Mashey has clarified in a comment that this was not Bell Labs' coding system, but a shorthand he used in what he wrote here. So much for my R2-D2 conceit and illustration. But it's a cute projector and will stay. : - )]

Bell Labs is important for many reasons. It epitomized an era when industry played a big role in blue-sky inquiry. Not surprisingly, Steven Chu, now tapped as the next secretary of energy, got the idea that led to his shared 1997 Nobel Prize while having lunch in a Bell Labs cafeteria. Those days are long gone. (These days, the energy industry spends a smaller proportion of its revenue on research than the dog-food industry, as Nate Lewis of Caltech says.)

Some readers may see this as a detour from the core mission of Dot Earth, but I don’t. If governments and other public and private institutions don’t intensify efforts to stimulate innovation and enterprise (the exploitation of new ideas), particularly in the energy arena, it’s hard to see a relatively smooth road toward a decent life on a finite planet for the nine billion people, more or less, who will inhabit it by midcentury.

Here’s Mr. Mashey’s comment:

The Bell Labs building in Holmdel, N.J., where Steven Chu got his Nobel idea. (Dith Pran/ The New York Times)

From John Mashey:

1) There’s no way we should have a Department of Innovation.

2) At least in Energy, Dr. Chu has worked at Berkeley, Stanford, and before that at Bell Labs. None of these are innovation slouches.

BELL LABS,ONCE UPON A TIME
Once upon a time, Bell Laboratories employed about 25,000 people in R&D, and was usually considered the premier industrial R&D lab in the world. It was part of the Bell System, when one could say … “monopoly money is really nice.”

From its creation in 1925, Bell Labs generated:

- a few Nobel prizes
- numerous important breakthroughs
- a truly huge number of incremental improvements

Modern technology has many other contributors, but an amazing amount of modern computing and communications technologies has some heritage somewhere in Bell Labs’ patents, software, or mathematics. AT&T and the Federal Government had a love/hate relationship sometimes, and in some cases, the latter actually slowed innovation at the former because it was a afraid a big monopoly would get even stronger.

I worked there from 1973-1983, fortunately mostly within excellent management chains and for many outstanding managers, including one who became C.T.O. of Bell Labs and another who became President. Bell Labs generated many breakthroughs, BUT:

These managers always said:

“Never schedule breakthroughs.”

Why would they say that?

R&D PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT & PROGRESSIVE COMMITMENT
Consider normal good R&D portfolio management, as practiced by companies and governments capable of long-term thinking, and who understand technology diffusion and inertia of huge installed bases.

Our classification was more-or-less as follows. Different people use different labels, and in some places, combine R2+D1, or D1+D2, or R2+D1+D2.

I’ve done/managed all but pure R1:

Pure Research (R1) many little projects, modest $
Applied Research (R2)
Exploratory Development (D1)
Advanced Development (D2)
Development (D3) might include pilot plants, beta tests, etc.
Deployment & scaleup, cost reductions, etc. (D4) $$$$$$

The typical methodology is:

a) Spend a big chunk of $$ on deployment of what works already, knowing that volume & experience will help costs come down, and of course, in the energy case, there are plenty of efficiencies around that are zero-cost, although they may require upfront capital.

b) Meanwhile, spend some money on lots of little Research projects, select ones that have promise and take them further. This is usually called “progressive commitment” - you normally have lots of little R projects, and fewer, but bigger D projects, and then most of the money gets spent in deployment and scaleup of something you know works scalably.

c) One needs competent management of this process.

At Bell Labs, real R was only about 7%. That was tiny compared to the 100s of thousands of people involved in manufacturing, deployment, and support, and even small compared to the bulk of people doing Development.

The Bell System had more than 1M employees at that point, and really did think in terms of decades, which many businesses do not.

Given the scale (in the old Bell System days), we had to install things that worked, not counting on what our R folks might invent. We knew they’d invent interesting things, but we also knew it might be *20 years* before we could really use them, and some things (like bubble memories) worked, but never well enough to win.

If you want to get things to happen, you set up disciplined R&D programs that allow for the somewhat chaotic nature of real R1.

NOW? GOVERNMENT, UNIVERSITIES, VCs.
THESE DAYS, Bell Labs is a much smaller place, XEROX PARC isn’t what it was, and large industrial R is less prevalent. Government R&D labs range from superb to rather slow, and sometimes cost-insensitive. DARPA has done some fine project management.

In the USA, most (R1 + R2) is done at universities. Places like Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, Georgia Tech, etc, etc have serious efforts in many areas of energy R&D.

a) One needs the right project managers in government.

b) Good R&D (esp through D1, maybe D2) must happen in universities and elsewhere.

c) Then, it has to get commercialized, which may happen through existing companies or maybe startups. I work with VCs. They don’t fund R, at least not on purpose :-). They love D3 and D4, although they might fund D2 if they must, to get in early.

d) Government doesn’t simulate VCs very well, with rare exceptions. I’ve had to tell a number of government people that, and they never like it. Government must fund basic research, pass the right rules, encourage entrepreneurs, make it easy to start/stop businesses, offer sensible consistency for long-term investments.

Government’s role seems mainly in funding R1+R2, and enabling D4, and sometimes helping D3 with purchasing power. But in picking the potential winners in the middle, it is rare to find the right skillset in government.

Original here