Lessons From History’s Greatest R&D Labs by Eric Gilliam

Edison built his god-like reputation by dreaming in specific applications. He kept market, resource, and manufacturing constraints in mind from the earliest stages of his projects. Edison dreamed practical, realizable dreams. And when the limitations of component technologies stood in the way of his dreams, he often had the talent to invent new components or improve existing materials. (View Highlight)

Edison was clearly doing a different kind of dreaming than those who do basic research. His lighting work embodies what extreme ambition looks like in application-centric research. (View Highlight)

Edison created his lab as a way to scale himself. As a result, to understand how his lab operated, one needs to know how Edison himself carried out his explorations. Edison was one of the more stubborn experimentalists of all time. He spent most of his waking hours carrying out one experiment or another. (View Highlight)

Contained in his head was a database of countless experiments and results that made it seem as if his “intuition” was far beyond his contemporaries. (View Highlight)

Edison wanted to change the world with his technologies more than he wanted to get rich (View Highlight)

He did not optimize for profitability, but he knew his ideas needed to be profitable. Nobody who wanted to optimize for profit would have pursued lighting in the way Edison did. The technical risks were too great. (View Highlight)

some time working on a project area, Edison would often grow antsy and wish to move on to the next thing — he craved novelty. (View Highlight)

Menlo Park’s electrical activities provide a great management playbook for what it looks like to direct a lab’s efforts toward a single, major system. (View Highlight)

Whitney permitted him to undertake any course of investigation of any phenomenon he wanted, but it had to be directly related to an existing problem/limitation/constraint that the applied folks were working through. These applied folks were working on projects that rather directly plugged into GE’s operations, so there was minimal risk of Langmuir’s work not amounting to anything useful if he succeeded and found answers. (View Highlight)

But unforeseen results constantly took Langmuir off in different directions. Exploring these unforeseen results often entailed new courses of experiment altogether. With his long leash, Langmuir was able to figure out that imperfect vacua were not what caused bulb blackening at all. (View Highlight)

Edison came first and had to shoulder the burden of developing an extensive technical system to power the “killer app” that was his bulb. (View Highlight)

Even most of Edison’s projects were modest in relation to his lighting work. When inventing for existing fields, such as telephony, Edison contained his inventive streak to working within existing technical systems. (View Highlight)

When adding to Bell’s telephone, he simply invented a carbon transmitter that could plug directly into the system. This device made voices come through much clearer. That was it: one gadget that cleanly plugged into the existing system. Technologies like these may not be as earth-shattering as Edison’s lighting system, but they were still enough to make him a world-famous inventor in his own time. (View Highlight)

optimizing impact (View Highlight)

BBN also provided its most talented individuals latitude to ply their minds broadly. Many projects at BBN showcased the extreme potential of small teams of talented individuals with broad technical knowledge. (View Highlight)

emulating BBN and CMU’s strategies to balance the two. (View Highlight)

A systems engineer is worth it when, under the right scrutiny, it might turn out that the best problem is 10X as financially valuable, does 50X the social good, or is 2X as likely to work as just some run-of-the-mill good problem. (View Highlight)

any new applied science org that can dedicate an (ideally full-time) individual to doing the work of a systems engineer should strongly consider it. (View Highlight)

TMC put itself in the unfortunate position of raising some of its funds from investors whose incentives were not aligned with theirs. (View Highlight)

Another way to describe this model is as a “fund department heads, not projects” model. The model allows one or two individuals to largely shape the research vision, hiring, project selection, capital purchasing, etc. of an entire department at once. In addition, it allows these individuals the latitude to replace salaries spent on additional professors or grad students with full-time engineers or discretionary capital expenses as needed. (View Highlight)