Corporate Research Should Prioritize Social Impact
In several of my recent Medium articles, I have developed parts of the same theme. The argument goes as follows:
· The conflict between natural and man-made systems has reached a point where man could be approaching extinction. Covid-19 is a dramatic reminder!
· We can no longer rely on the government to solve environmental, public health and wealth inequality issues. Covid-19 may be further proof.
· Corporations and especially multinational corporations must step up, prioritize social impact over shareholder returns and update their business model(s) to focus on social impact. Corporations have three choices for how to increase their social impact.
· Corporate research spending of $780 billion annually dwarfs government research spending by a factor of six. (More of this money should be directed to universities.[1])
The enthymeme or hidden premise in this argument, and the purpose of this article, is that the corporate research spending should be directed more toward pure research and potential social impact.
The history of Bell Labs, originally a subsidiary of AT&T, highlights how effective corporate research can be for pure research, social impact and commercial purposes. If we were to point to the single organization most responsible for the Computer Age and the 3rd Industrial Revolution[2], I would propose Bell Labs. Three noteworthy Bell researchers document my view.
1. Claude Shannon
In 1948 Shannon published in a Bell Labs journal “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”, a truly transformative example of research that went on to be called Information Theory. Today Information Theory is applied in almost every discipline, from physics to engineering, economics and sociology. From amongst the many novel findings in the article, perhaps the most remarkable is that any wave could be transmitted as 0–1 bits through a channel. This finding launched digital telephony, video, music and other signal processing. Such digital information supported, respectively, cellular telephony, Netflix, CDs and many medical image diagnostic devices to cite a few examples. Shannon went on to become a professor at MIT.
2. William Shockley
Shockley invented the transistor, which lead him to further research and the invention of the semi-conductor. For this research, Shockley shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956. Shockley went on to become a professor at Stanford.
3. Richard Hamming
Hamming invented the eighth bit error-correcting code which enhanced message signal integrity, thereby greatly increasing confidence in computing and the new digital communications. Hamming wrote a wonderful book, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering, which every young researcher should read. He explains why so many researchers only do iterative research and how some researchers change the world and have real social impact.
Additional noteworthy accomplishments at Bell Labs included developing the UNIX operating system, C and C+ programming languages and eight other Nobel prizes in addition to Shockley. For the student of corporate research, I recommend Jon Gertner’s book, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation. The separate organization outside the day-to-day corporate activities, what we now call a skunkworks, was the approach used by AT&T to manage Bell Labs. Today corporate skunkworks are supplemented by venturing investing in several forms and collaboration with universities.
If we accept my argument that we need the corporates to address the environment and the related public health problems, an important part of this new focus is through their research spending. Then we should ask, what direction for research does Bell Labs inspire?
1. We need corporate research to focus on pure research in fundamental science. Eric Schmidt, former CEO at Google, frames the problem well:
“But new technologies that allow a paradigm shift in the way we solve problems would be profound. Many of today’s toughest problems exist because we are at the limit of what we can understand.”
Schmidt made this comment in March 2020[3], which suggests that the technologies he refers to are not the already advanced AI (artificial intelligence), CRISPR and computational combinatorics. Schmidt is setting the stage for the technologies of the 5th Industrial Revolution[4], which will come from pure science research today.
2. We need less focus on iterative research, marginal improvements in products, services and customer experience. For example, the Tide detergent that now comes in plastic balls (that people on the Internet try to eat) may be a washing improvement, but did we need to use more plastic for such marginal benefit. Incremental research consumes a lot of research money in corporations and universities for basically very limited positive social impact. We can look at the surprises in the day to day, iterative research as the source of the breakthroughs, but that is to set the bar too low as Hamming pointed out. Corporate research needs to be transformative targeting new theories, fundamentals of science and computational models.
3. Research needs to be more collaborative or interdisciplinary to capture the range of domain expertise and frameworks that are required today to work on fundamental science. Computational physics, chemistry and biology document this trend. Also, more and more social research now incorporates natural science researchers and computation, as techniques such as agent-based modeling are applied to the difficult social problems.
4. Research needs to be more expansive, what the National Science Foundation (NSF) calls transdisciplinary. Research collaboration needs to expand beyond one organization to encompass partners in universities, industry, non-profits, NGOs and community organizations … in multiple countries. Many think of edge computing as enormous sensor networks capturing information for corporations and national security agencies, but this same philosophy and infrastructure supports international collaboration for scientific and social research. We now have the technology widely available to make “diversity improves collaboration” a worldwide reality.
5. We need corporations to embrace the return to open source (such as C+ and Unix mentioned above). One of the great examples from the pandemic was all the new ventilator designs that were shared through open source licensing. Yes, some of the designs did not work, but just one idea could improve all the ventilators in the world. If people would remember the example of Red Hat, that built a business on top of open source Linux and was acquired by IBM, or Microsoft making 60,000+ patents open source, we see how economic and social value can be created through open source and the potential for collaboration. Much of the collaboration in open source is self-organizing.
Years ago I came across a quote, the source now long lost, that said that AI will solve all the complicated problems and man will be left with the complex ones.[5] Simple problems are tying your shoes. Complicated problems are following the blueprint to build an office building. Complex problems are the social and environmental problems. AI will solve most of the complicated problems in this century. We need more research to develop the tools and technologies to solve the complex problems. We need the corporations to lead the research to find the solutions, and for that, we need the corporations to prioritize social impact ahead of shareholder return.
The opinions expressed in this article are my own and do not reflect the views of any organization with whom I am affiliated.
[1] I work at a state university, Florida International University (FIU), where I spend much of my time to commercialize faculty research.
[2] According to the World Economic Forum, we are currently in the 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR). https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/the-fourth-industrial-revolution-what-it-means-and-how-to-respond/
[3] https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/in-disruptive-times-the-power-comes-from-people-an-interview-with-eric-schmidt
[4] According to the World Economic Forum, we are currently in the 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR). https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/the-fourth-industrial-revolution-what-it-means-and-how-to-respond/
[5] This quote had a profound effect on my learning and scholarship and lead to my exploration of design thinking, complexity science, AI and more mathematics, statistics and physics. Biology followed.
