
Mossberg: The Trump effect - Corrado
http://www.recode.net/2017/1/4/14162222/mossberg-trump-effect-policy
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daly
TL;DR Bring back Corporate Research divisions tax free and everybody wins.

I've been a "research rat" all my life. I did research at Unimation, the first
robot company. I worked at IBM Research. I've worked at Universities.

At IBM Research under Ralph Gomory, the company valued research. It measured
itself against other companies like Bell Labs. I had the freedom to work on
individual projects (e.g. rewritable paper and a Design-to-Build system that
generated robot assembly plans from 3D CAD drawings). I worked on long term
group projects, one of which was the Axiom computer algebra system.

IBM valued "wild ducks", the people who thought of new things regardless of
their place in the organization. For instance, the "nipple mouse" that used to
be in the center of keyboards was invented by Ted Selker who worked in the
math department.

The key turning point seemed to be when Reagan shut down the Federal Labs. If
you worked with someone outside of IBM Research your work was much more valued
than inside efforts. The Federal Labs were a great partner in research. Once
they were gone a lot of projects lost outside collaboration. The effect was
widespread and deep. Axiom, for instance, was a multi-year pure research
project in computer algebra. It was jointly funded by the company and the
Federal labs. When the labs closed Axiom was sold, becoming a commercial
competitor to Mathematica and Maple. (It is now open source and I'm doing
unfunded research in program proofs for computational mathematics).

Companies don't seem to invest in "real research". Apple, Google, Microsoft,
and Facebook are sitting on billions of dollars of cash. You would think that
they would create a research lab equivalent to Bell Labs (where the Neural
Network work was done in the 90s), or IBM Research (where the atomic
microscope work was done). Gomory used to say you could employ 3 researchers
per 1 million dollars. A billion dollars a year is 3000 researchers. Gomory
pointed out that only 1 in 10 research projects ever produced anything that
could be sold. That would be 100 new products a year, assuming 3 people per
project. Gomory pointed out that "real research" took 10 years to become
products. So start now.

There is a push to bring the "hidden dollars" kept overseas by Apple back into
the U.S. at a lower tax rate. Instead, reduce the tax rate if the money is put
into research. Let the big companies have tax breaks to run "corporate
research", like Bell Labs and IBM Research. Then these company research
efforts can work with universities to fund research graduate students and give
them a career path worth their PhD. Tell Apple it can pump 1 Billion dollars a
year tax free into a corporate research division and see how quickly the
flowers bloom.

