
Is America’s age of discovery over? - timr
http://life.salon.com/2011/10/08/is_americas_age_of_discovery_over/singleton/
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tokenadult
The short answer is no, and even the article says so:

"The Media Lab is, in many ways, the antithesis of a corporate R&D lab. It
focuses on human needs, but has no blinders—no time constraints or deadlines,
no shareholders to please. It celebrates openness and collaboration between
different disciplines and entities. But it winnows ideas quickly because of
the emphasis on testing concepts through prototype building. The discoveries
that work find their way into the world, with E Ink as exhibit A.

"And then there is SRI. Founded in 1946 in Menlo Park, California, as the
Stanford Research Institute, it is now the largest nongovernmental lab in the
United States, with roughly $500 million in government-and corporate-funded
projects. Like the Media Lab, SRI stretches the R&D horizon far beyond the
typical corporate three-to-five-year view. But SRI shows that a research lab
armed with a system for commercialization of ideas can successfully cross the
so-called valley of death that separates the lab from the marketplace—a route
littered with unread papers and long-forgotten patents describing products
that never connected with customers."

