This is false. Startups are designed to commercialize technologies whose core invention already exists. BioNTech and Moderna both commercialized/developed platforms based on innovations from academic labs. https://twitter.com/IlanGur/status/1353215071946608640
That’s super valuable, of course; going from the lab to the factory and clinic is a huge undertaking. But it’s very different from Bell Labs.
Shockley worked on fundamental applied physics for decades before making the first working transistor. In other words, Bell Labs did both the “academic research” and “development” parts.
A startup has to prove it can make money for investors within 5-10 years. The funding model’s not designed for long research projects.
Bell Labs had no worries about proving and capturing a market. They were a gov’t enforced monopoly of something everybody wanted — telephone calls.
And they had an eminently practical reason to invest in research: demand for telecommunications was growing faster than supply could keep up. They *needed* new tech to keep riding that tiger.
Abundant guaranteed demand + supply bottlenecked by fundamentally hard technical problems are the conditions that bred Bell Labs.
A startup, in its ideal form, is almost the exact opposite; taking advantage of a new source of abundance to test whether’s a market for a particular application of that abundance.
At a core level I think this is why my startup failed. I wanted to run a $1-5M experiment that nobody else was doing and seemed like the obvious first step in searching for anti-aging drugs. VC’s weren’t interested. You’re supposed to do that part in academia.
Big companies’ industrial labs are way more like Bell Labs than startups are. There’s still an open question of why, say, Siemens or Phillips don’t seem to have invented stuff as important as the transistor or laser, and it’s not because nobody there is smart.
I don’t know what Bell Labs did better than other big industrial companies’ innovation/research centers. I’m skeptical anybody knows.
But saying *startups* are the new Bell Labs just shows you haven’t really thought about the issue beyond rah-rah keywords.
Organizations focused on creating a single technology that doesn’t exist yet, with more discipline than “pure research” academic departments but without pressure to market a product immediately, seem like the sensible way to organize things.
I don’t know enough to know if it’s working, but I kind of like how the EE department at the National University in Taiwan is totally frank about “we do the research they use in TSMC and if you go to school here you can get a job there.” It’s unpretentious and refreshing.
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