The death of corporate research labs
Research is risky, it's easy to cut for short term gains, it's very hard to quantify before POC and that makes it very very hard to justify keeping, and few Co panties are good at the whole pipeline needed to turn research into profits and research is best done by people with equity. Those are just some of the reasons that the modern world has moved to a model where small, new companies soley do research and then either sell/license it or sell themselves to bigger companies.<p>Drucker wrote about this in (I think) the 90s. Its actually a much more sensible way to do this work.