NW200: Where integration meets R&D , 04/24/00

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From RFC 2068 Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1:

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The server has not found anything matching the Request-URI. No indication is given of whether the condition is temporary or permanent.

If the server does not wish to make this information available to the client, the status code 403 (Forbidden) can be used instead. The 410 (Gone) status code SHOULD be used if the server knows, through some internally configurable mechanism, that an old resource is permanently unavailable and has no forwarding address.

Error 404--Not Found

From RFC 2068 Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1:

10.4.5 404 Not Found

The server has not found anything matching the Request-URI. No indication is given of whether the condition is temporary or permanent.

In the acquisition-heavy network industry, technology integration has become standard business fare for the R&D team.

BY JULIE BORT
Network World, 4/24/00

Why has acquisition become such a cornerstone of innovation?

Two reasons, says Bob Martin, a vice president of Bell Labs and chief technical officer for Lucent in Murray Hill, N.J. "One is the speed at which the market is moving. The other is the availability of sophisticated technology building blocks."

These technology building blocks are items such as supersmart microchips that handle complex networking functions. "They have allowed venture capital to create little companies with quick time to market. Without these building blocks, such companies would have to have much larger development teams," Martin says.

As a result, research has moved from the hands of a few big labs into the hands of many.

"Someone today can raise $100 million in the capital markets or in an IPO. It's creating almost free capital for the research market. . . . We're not as dependent on two or three big labs," says Francis Narin, president of CHI Research, a Haddon Heights, N.J., research and development consultant.

The downside is that externally developed products require researchers to have a much different skill set from the one needed for invention. They must become integrators.

"A member of ours has the title 'vice president of business growth,' not chief technology officer. He's a technology integrator, rather than a product producer," says Charles Larson, president of Industrial Research Institute, an association of researchers in Washington, D.C.

This has caused some finger-wagging within the research community. The argument, made by some old-line engineers, is that integration is a misuse of a researcher's talents, turning him into an assimilator rather than a creator. Breakthroughs may be sacrificed for short-term gain, they argue.

However, the data doesn't support this argument. Those involved in the new R&D say integration is every bit as challenging and important as innovation.

"If you ask people working on a new technology, they'll tell you that integration is harder. You've got to learn a new environment. If you could do it all yourself, most probably you would. But integration can lessen your time to market," says Arvind Krishna, director at Foundations of Internet Research at the IBM Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, N.Y.

Furthermore, market pressure may actually increase innovation, while exposure to new technologies through integration expands a researcher's knowledge, says Robert Buderi, author of the soon-to-be-published Engines of Tomorrow: How the World's Best Companies are Using their Research Labs to Win the Future.

Most experts agree: If integration has a long-term downside, it has yet to materialize.

Back to "The new R&D"

Sidebar: "E-commerce for intellectual property"

Related links

Lucent Technologies: ONG

Clinton to unveil proposal for R&D spending
Network World, 01/24/00.

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