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The End of the Corporate Lab
Posted by
Soulskill
on Sun Dec 16, 2007 10:55 AM
from the keep-this-under-your-hat dept.
from the keep-this-under-your-hat dept.
Doofus writes "The NYTimes is running an article about the end of the corporate lab and the growing partnerships between businesses and universities around the country. A number of researchers are concerned about the potential influence of business goals on universities' strategic research priorities, and the possible censoring of research antithetical to a corporate sponsor's business interests. Others claim that the universities' intellectual freedom is more liberated by corporate involvement. As the article states, 'The alternative to corporate funds is for universities to rely even more on government funds. And that raises parallel issues in the minds of some academics.'"
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All this money... (Score:3, Insightful)
Where is all the money going?
Solid gold microscopes?
Re:All this money... (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:All this money... (Score:5, Informative)
tens of millions of dollars would go into remodeling buildings
Yes. Stanford is big on that. They just rebuilt the stadium and the engineering quad, and the business school is next. The business school isn't fancy enough. The new one will be about the same size, but more luxurious.
Stanford has "Bob the Builder", Robert Reidy, "vice provost for land and buildings", upgraded last year to "vice president for land, buildings and real estate". He's a construction manager by background, and a good one. He handled the rebuild and expansion of Stanford's large shopping mall, and finished that job ahead of schedule. (I once heard a young blonde undergrad saying "Did you know this place has a totally awesome mall?" Stanford's mall is so upscale it has a Neiman-Marcus, a Nordstrom, a Tiffanys, and a grocery store with signs like "Champagne and caviar - enjoy them tonight")
If you look at the numbers, Stanford is a real estate and investment company [stanfordmanage.org] that runs an educational operation on the side, to get the tax break. In 1991, the University split off the investment and real estate side of the operation into the Stanford Management Company, which has been so successful it's come to dominate the business.
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Re:All this money... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:All this money... (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, I thought that, too. Our motto was: "publish or die". Today that has been changed to "get funding or get fired".
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I bet you also though that the untied States Government was "of thwe people, by the people and for the people." and that the police are there "to protect and serve". Next you'll tell me that "the pen is mightier than the sword" and "Santa Claus is comin' to town."
Well I suppose it is a Universities job to help introduce you to adult life, so there's your lesson: Big Corporations
Re: All this money... (Score:2)
When I worked in the dean's office, tens of millions of dollars would go into remodeling buildings. Not like 10 million for all of them, but for each one, one at a time, and repeat. Administrators are in the businesses of castle building and acquiring property . They feel the bigger the buildings, the more visibility is given to learning. Or something like that.
Research money usually can't be spent on that kind of thing (with some exceptions, such as the renovations needed for a nuclear reactor or an earthquake lab). Legislatures are usually reluctant to fund it too, and tuition usually doesn't cover basic operating expenses. (Private schools' tuition is higher because they don't have a legislature kicking in money to keep tuition low.)
That's why your favorite campus is probably coverted with buildings named after rich people.
Oh, and *some* amount of renovation i
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yup, and they'll be paying for many of those buildings for a while, as many of them were at least partially financed with debt. The stupid part is this was partly driven by an urge to show up higher in some list in a magazine that had arbitrary rankings based in things like recreation- so they financed giant indoor jungle gyms (er, climbing walls), in order to "stay competitive." That, and the aeron cha
Re:All this money... (Score:5, Insightful)
As a student at a public university with several multi-tens-of-millions-of-dollars projects in the works (including a new $150 million library) I'm perfectly happy with this. All the money my University makes from corporate sponsorships and collaborations (centered around a widely acclaimed research park [ncsu.edu]) goes towards giving the College of Engineering a new campus and the room it needs to grow, bringing industry groups into a closer relationship with faculty and students giving on-campus opportunities [ncsu.edu] for internships and job experience, leveraging the expertise of our research faculty [ncsu.edu] to attract more investment and collaboration, funding projects which give students access to [ncsu.edu]amazing computing resources [ncsu.edu]- the list continues. Our main library recently underwent a ~$12 million renovation which created a huge new space to facilitate student collaboration, a new undergraduate science teaching lab was built a couple years ago and freed up valuable bench-space in departmental buildings to devote to research.
Some people may be screaming and hollering about the impact this has on the focus of University research- but I've seen nothing but good come out of it. Students are better equipped to enter either academia or industry. Faculty members have more sources of funding and expertise to conduct application-oriented research. Industry partners get a jump on new technologies coming out of academic labs, are able bring them to market faster with the University profiting from the technologies, from the partnerships, from the publicity and from more real-world savvy graduates who took advantage of the resources made available to them. Given the rigid controls the University puts on its intellectual property rights over technology developed by its faculty- its a win-win situation which isn't likely to change as long as the relationships developed are managed properly.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I love this (not so new) term that floats around universities. I remember 'collaborating' many years ago, I'd do week 2n assignment, my friend would do week 2n+1.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
A million dollars 30 years ago was a lot of money. A million dollars 10 years ago was a lot of money. With the real estate boom/bubble and the now worse than canadian USD, a million bucks just isn't that much anymore.
Thats why I'm going to a community college. Its something along the lines of $100 a credit hour, compared to my (hopefully) transfer school Depaul University CTI which will be like $20k+ and then room and board.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:All this money... (Score:4, Informative)
In any case, the purpose of a bureaucracy is to spend the budget. The golden rule is: "if you haven't spent what you were given, you'll be given less next year"... so everyone spends everything they got... even if it's to hire a string quartet for the annual holiday party of the Pathology department. (Yes, this is what they did in our department, all the while talking about how we need to cut $2.5M from the budget.)
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Re:All this money... (Score:5, Informative)
You got that right. The worst performance review I ever received was my first year at Bell Labs. I had failed to spend my budget for the year. This was a major infraction. Needless to say, I fixed that problem the next year.
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Re: (Score:2)
When University researchers get funding, ~50% of it goes strait to the administration. They say it pays for power, infrastructure and stuff like that. (It doesn't pay for salaries and grad student tuition, which also come out of research funding.) Of course, administrators are by far the highest paid people on campus. They have the biggest offices in the fanciest buildings. Often their houses and cars are bought by the university. So, I think I know where the money is going.
Re:All this money... (Score:5, Interesting)
Where is all the money going?
I'm predicting that in less than 20 years, the United States will no longer be a bastion of intellectuals. Why? Because it isn't investing enough in its population's education while other countries like India and China are sending their best and brightest to learn as much as they can, so when they return home they can surpass the West and leave them in the dust.
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Re: (Score:2)
Another The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century [amazon.com] reader, I see. Frightening stuff. We should feel like Great Britain just
Universities are a competitive business (Score:3, Insightful)
Where is all the money going?
The money is going to attract the best and brightest students, so the university can move up the weird little pecking order established by the US News & World Report rankings. The building projects are costly, but they're designed to make these universities desirable. Get the best students, get the best researchers and published professors, get the big money, grow.
This has also been sustained by the baby boomlet that followed Generation X. There are a lot of Millennial
what about research cancelation? (Score:2)
The future of American research (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Bell Labs (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
I am not interested in being sold anything more, unless it has to do with health and making life more interesting and enjoyable(inexpensive flying cars, not a cell phone with a contract). And at that, if it to be done o
Flawed premise. (Score:2, Interesting)
(Not that the government actually has any money, per se, but they do have the legal right to counterfeit!)
More Flawed premise in TFA. (Score:2)
Why do research? (Score:2, Funny)
Prestige? (Score:3, Interesting)
On the other hand, lack of drive for something more than just increased bank account may be the reason the innovation has stagnated in US. If IBM doesn't drop it's research labs like they did with PC business, perhaps there is hope for them yet.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Prestige? (Score:5, Interesting)
Agreed.
I understand you're probably more concerned about cheap labour in less well off countries. That's always going to be a fact of life, and if you want to sell stuff to those countries, you've got to allow them to sell stuff to you.
No, you don't
I think you have to look at what is actually happening here, and particularly in the case of China you have to look at their history. You're correct: I'm not concerned about the EU, not at this point. We can trade with the EU, because most of their cultures and legal systems are similar enough to ours that both sides are willing to let the other leave the table with something. That is not true with Japan, or China, or any of a host of other nations that see the European Union and the United States as exploitable resources, as targets, for their own economic engines. Europe is by no means immune to what is happening to the United States: if the various European nations don't start taking some steps, they will find their own ability to provide for themselves being lost, just as ours has been lost. Do you realize that, right now, we can't even clothe ourselves without China? Our giant textile mills are lying fallow, their machinery sold to China for a pittance. Not only are we not the Land of the Free anymore, we're not even independent enough to put a shirt on our collective back. Yeah, that bothers me. It should bother you too. Better hang on to those hand-me-downs.
The difference here is one of culture clash: the Chinese do not operate by the same legal and cultural traditions that govern business relationships between the U.S. and Europe. They just don't, and we've been treating them as if they do. That mistake has cost us, is still costing us. If you examine past interactions between China and the British Empire you'll realize that China has no qualms about using their economy as a weapon (any more than the U.S. does, only when we do it everybody gets all pissy about it.) When you get right down to it, China has exhibited little interest in equitable trade. They do, however, want to pick our brains for whatever we have of value, extract all the hard currency they can, while simultaneously decimating domestic manufacturing capability. How is this of benefit to the people of the U.S.? I've been asking this question here on Slashdot for months, and haven't yet received any answer other than, "but, but
Japan, while nominally an ally, has done more than its share to destroy significant sectors of our manufacturing base. Did you know that Boeing can no longer manufacture avionics? Nope
So get used to living in a third world country, my fri
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Why not? I talk to myself all the time. Occupational hazard for a programmer, I think.
Not very liberating at all (Score:5, Interesting)
*I have no intention of starting a heated political discussion, I'm just arguing the similarities of the situations.
Bell made no money on the transistor? (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Not to mention the fact that the Bell System most benefited from the lower costs and increased reliability of solid-state equipment.
Government vs. Corporate Funding (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: Government vs. Corporate Funding (Score:2)
Well I trust the corporate agenda is always to find ways to make money granted. Who says the govt. wants anything more "humane" either? Much of the govt. research these days is Military based. Not necessarily probing inner-most secrets of the universe or trying to better humanity (unless you count that third eye from an a-bomb better, hey it's an improvement!).
Granted, the government does spend a huge amount of money on military research. But that's hardly the whole story. If you want an idea of what else they fund, look at the list of upcoming grant proposal deadlines at NSF [nsf.gov], or similarly for various other agencies.
Decline in Silicon Valley (Score:5, Insightful)
Japanese, European and Korean companies are not shutting down their corporate labs. Many of them even have US labs. Honda Research Institute [honda-ri.com] has a location in Silicon Valley. So does Sony [scea.com]. Even Volkswagen [vwerl.com] has a Silicon Valley research facility.
On the other hand, DEC's labs are gone, HP's have shrunk, PARC is hanging on but nobody cares, and most of IBM Almaden's space is leased out or vacant.
The big advantage of corporate research labs is that they can actually make stuff. In academia, you have grad students trying to build things. They're usually not good at fabrication, they don't have the right resources, and they take too long. In corporate research labs in a company with substantial engineering resources, there's access to real fabrication capability and the people who know how to use it.
This is less of an issue with pure software, but in the robotics world, academic robotics suffered from such problems for years.
Funding is only half the solution (Score:3, Interesting)
Providing funding for research is the easy part of the problem. (As much as I hate this terminology...) Sponsors need to embed private sector employees in the research areas of academic departments for administrative and operational support. The operational efficiencies of industry applied directly in these areas would ensure research funds are used for research. This would also limit the amount of overhead universities could charge; and minimize the political redistribution of "operational overhead" -- a game which consumes far too much time, committee meetings, and political activity currently.
Private sector employees, both support staff and researchers, should also rotate thru these academic research areas on a regular basis while in the employ of the private sector sponsor. Private sector employees would get an opportunity to broaden their perspectives; sponsors would get effective inside auditors in these research areas. Research students would get direct exposure to the requirements of industry.
University support staff could spend their time and budgets on supporting education. This could have a positive impact on the spiraling cost of tuition. And the quality of education.
Cutting out the middle man (Score:3, Insightful)
The Bad, Suboptimal, and Ugly. (Score:5, Insightful)
In my experience, large corporations are just very bad at running labs. The current fashion for streamlining, downsizing and outsourcing is especially harmful, because it multiplies and deepens the dividing lines in the organization, increases internal communication problems and gives bureaucracy the opportunity to skyrocket. The average manager (most managers are very average) is risk-averse, has a strong territorial instinct, and will discourage rather than encourage a multi-disciplinary approach. As for corporate boards, most people are deeply unwilling to believe that something they don't understand can be of any importance, and board members as a rule don't understand anything about research.
On the other hand, university labs are bad at turning out products. Purely academic research tends to be unbound by practical considerations, which is a strength because it permits the exploration of possible dead ends, but also tends to result in the proverbial cure for cancer that has the small downside of killing the patient in the process. And beautiful new technology, if left in university hands, may simply fail to ever reach the marketplace; I've seen things in laser technology 20 years ago which would be very useful if we had them now, but they were never commercialized. To succeed new technology needs to get out of the academic lab, and the traditional way is a spin-off which seeks a partner in a large corporation.
Today, it is easy to tell when a technology is mature: When the big corporations start buying up the small players who developed it. For example, the acquisition this year of the genome sequencing companies (454, Solexa, a few others) by larger corporations (Roche, Illumina, ABI) marks the maturity of genome sequencing. However, whenever a large corporation buys a small and successful research company, it manages to thoroughly mess it up within ten years; that's why large firms are buying new laboratories all the time.
The best compromise seems to have been established in laboratories that are not purely academic, but not really corporate either. Think of the Max Planck institute, the Fraunhofer institute, NASA with its JPL, Los Alamos. They are not necessarily not-for-profit; the Fraunhofer earns millions of royalties on the MP3 format. Nor are they small players, many of them are much bigger than corporate labs could ever be, and employ thousands of scientists. They have a management which understands research, but they also pursue more practical ends than completing someone's PhD thesis.
Re:Because Corporations (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that when the grad students grow up and start looking for jobs they might go to work for one of your competitors. And it isn't like you can tie them up with a non-compete agreement.
Personally I think the answer lies somewhere in the middle. It is good to have multiple viewpoints when attacking a problem, and both corporate and academic types have much to contribute.
Parent
Re:Because Corporations (Score:5, Interesting)
Which is precisely why many people don't want our university system to become glorified vocational schools with product development facilities. We already have those things, what we need to do is preserve our only source of academic research.
The demand needs to come from the students though, nothing else will work. As long as students are demanding vocational school, that's what they'll get. Computer science departments are already more vocational than academic, and I hope that trend does not continue.
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Re:Mod up; corps gain control of fund. discovery (Score:5, Insightful)
These companies are likely to be sorely disappointed in my experience. I was working on a high tech volunteer project and out of 4 university based systems in the vehicle only one was ready, reliable and on time. Fortunately we had COTS alternatives.
I've also worked with a couple of students in our lab who were doing their theses. They seemed to take a great deal of time to produce rather routine results, whilst occupying a $100 per hour facility. One is now a teacher, the other has never been heard of again. I hope they enjoyed it, from our perspective they were a rather expensive gift to the community.
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Want to be useful? mow my lawn (Score:3, Insightful)
By your measurement, they failed. And by that same measurement, cancer research is an utter boondoggle.
By mine, they succeeded, if they showed measurable progress and understanding of the current state of knowledge.
COTS? Your examples highlight only that they were not challenged to do the appropriate things.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
What enemy? Are we in danger of invasion from China?! Why is this being framed in an exclusively military manner, when practically all technologal innovation is dual use?
Which is worse -- a major multinational taking that same research, patenting the hell out of it, manufacturing it overseas, and selling it back to the US... or a scenario where that information is also leaked to others, thereby creating competition and driving
Re:My worry is this (Score:4, Informative)
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Sorry, but get real (Score:2)
Go around in research institutes and look where the people are from. Sure, lots are americans... since 10 years ago or something. If you really are afraid of spies, that doesnt count at all.
Otoh, its nice for people like me, because for example in the berkeley labs you can pretty much find your way around if you speed german...
Re: My worry is this (Score:2)
University science faculties are increasingly being populated by foreigners.
I don't see what that has to do with corporate entanglements.
If what is happening continues to go on, I sense trouble for America's lead in research.
Traditionally most of those foreigners stay in the USA after they graduate. That contributed greatly to making the USA the technological powerhouse that it has been for the past half a century.
Of course, there's an increasing trend now for them to not come over in the first place, because lots of nations that formerly couldn't offer a top quality education are now becoming competitive.
What's threatening the USA's research base is -
Foreign grad students need not be evil... (Score:5, Insightful)
I know I care(d) more about events in Israel than I would if I didn't have Jewish friends, more about events in the Lebanon conflict than I would have if I hadn't known someone who'd taught there, more about events in the UK than I'd have if I didn't know people who've studied there, more about Canadian politics and IR than if I didn't spend time there, and more about disorder in Pakistan than I would if I hadn't met a very thoughtful English Major who lives there. I have stronger feelings about American policy in those places because of an exchange of knowledge.
It is hugely valuable to us as a nation to have a large number of foreigners grow familiar with us and our culture.
That being said, I don't know that it's right we're subsidizing it. Perhaps tax breaks to schools (as tax-exempt orgs) should take a hit if they don't maintain at least a certain number/percentage of US citizens in each graduate department over, say, any five-year period. That doesn't address the root of the problem, which lies more in instilling good work ethics in children when they're young, but it does give us a band-aid for it. (And it slows down the rate at which we're going even further into debt than we already are.)
Parent
Re:My worry is this (Score:4, Insightful)
You're obviously not aware of the situation in many schools, where Chinese students are displacing everyone else in key areas (such as materials science), where the deans of these departments are Chinese, who regularly take sabbaticals back to China to bring over even more Chinese students. These students are often actively hostile to non-Chinese, and make no bones about it. This is not the purpose for which we established our institutions of higher learning. If other countries, like China, want to play in our game they should have to make the same investment we did. As it is, they're robbing us blind and we're encouraging them. Some would call this "foot in self shoot" behavior.
The reality is this: we're educating our competition into becoming better competitors. You may think that is a good idea. Many of us do not. If you've been to Wal-Mart in the past few years, that should be all the "education" you need to understand what is happening to us.
Get used to being a third-world nation when we've been sucked dry, hollowed out, and left to die. It's in the cards.
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