It is an article of faith among most engineers that R&D is a Good Thing. There has been significant grumbling lately that the U.S. has not been doing enough of this activity, which is going to cause us to lose our lead on the rest of the world and demote us to the status of a third-world debtor nation. This fear has descended on Washington, where our erstwhile leaders have decided that Something Must Be Done. Hence, they have formed a committee to study how they should be studying the problem and in the meantime how they can make it sound like they are doing something really important by releasing pronouncements about what they are doing.

There have been significant results from past R&D efforts. The Internet grew out of early studies funded by DARPA, a number of interesting things came out of NASA, and subsidy of the Bell phone monopoly gave us UNIX. I have to wonder, though, if the R&D process has been left in the dust.

The recent Internet boom happened largely because the idea pantries of numerous companies all got raided at once. Things were changing at Internet speed, with new paradigms being spawned every other week. At some point the whole house of cards fell apart because it was largely built on sand. Since then, we have been reinforcing the foundations and are just now starting to see some of the ideas come to life in a more solid form, one that is ready for prime time.

Right now it seems like there is a dearth of new ideas because we are still working off the creations of the last generation. Behind he scenes research is being done much more effectively using previously unheard-of worldwide leverage. MIT has open-sourced much of its curriculum, a move comparable to the invention of the printing press in terms of how it can spread knowledge to those who can use it.

Is the era of government-sponsored R&D over? Does the future belong to empowered individuals?

Larry Mittag