The death of corporate research labs
Holdup. Lack of anti-trust enforcement is blamed (among other things) for the end of corporate R&amp;D, but Monopoly breakup is exactly what killed Bell labs! 9 smaller companies weren&#x27;t going to fund their own lab, and the only reason the lab existed was to find new markets to explore.
In fact, nearly all of the examples of successful R&amp;D labs came from corporations that so dominated their industry they put money into finding new investments: Xerox. Kodak Eastmann. Google might meet this definition.<p>I think we also overrate the significance of the corporate labs. There are not a lot of successful examples where the host company actually profited from the invention. Just a lot that bungled them or prematurely killed them (like when AT&amp;T almost invented the internet). Or snuck out accidentally (like the Xerox Alto).