Government labs are valuable but what made industrial labs even more valuable was that they were tied to companies that were deploying these technologies and thus had clearer missions. That’s a key distinction between Bell Labs and the DOE labs.
What the government potentially offers more paths to opportunity and success though, in that they do the research and then spin it out into the public sector to commercialize. So things that might not even get off the ground in the public sector get their chance and yet there is still a path for commercialization. That said, I’m sitting here a stones throw away from the national lab in Richland and I’m not sure why we don’t see even more innovation happening in the public sector here given the per capita number of phds, scientists and engineers here - my guess is we haven’t built the public sector infrastructure for it.
True, but AT&T and Xerox were kind of infamous for not capitalizing on what Bell Labs and PARC were creating. If you have either an iPhone or an Android phone you are using an OS based on UNIX and yet AT&T gets none of that money. If you are using Windows, Mac, or a graphical interface on Linux, you are using interface concepts created by Xerox, although likewise they "fumbled the future" (as a famous book about PARC put it).
