What industry invested over $525 billion last year... any educated guesses? That was the total amount of money spent on U.S. R & D in business, government and academia combined.
Here are approximate U.S. R & D expenditures for the last 5 years:
Edison's greatest accomplishment was his invention factory concept [R & D labs], using inter-disciplinary project teams solving problems in a multi-dimensional manner. In essence, he took R & D from a cottage industry to a commercial powerhouse, thus giving us our modern conception of technology driven change, or progress.
Between 1885 and 1929, many of the great American companies we recognize today, started their R & D centers and departments, helping to unleash a torrent of new products, services and of course patents:
These companies learned how to consider research as an investment akin to stocks and bonds; and created research portfolios to govern how their companies would spread the risk of invention from the simple evolutionary or incremental kind to revolutionary research that would create whole new industries and concepts.
Business learned the lessons of Edison well, and the world profited. Think of the validation for the great inventor. By the time he died in 1931, just about all of the nation's great companies built R & D labs or developed partnerships to perform R & D. Edison had codified the keys to team-based, technology driven progress --- a process that by its very existence defines the term innovation (innovation = invention + market thrust).
As a 37-year veteran of the R & D wars, I like to think of R & D as "technological due diligence", very similar to traditional due diligence that business entities perform to reduce the uncertainties of an acquisition... reducing it to acceptable risk. I have come to realize that when one performs R & D, it reduces the risk of technological acquisition or development... hence R & D is technological due diligence, with a somewhat long time delay. R & D converts uncertainty to risk.
Talk to you again soon...
Harry