First Seen
Harvard Business Review
November 26, 2019
By: Ashish Arora, Sharon Belenzon, Andrea Patacconi, Jungkyu Suh
Why It’s Interesting
Productivity growth in the U.S., which is powered by innovation, has been decelerating since 1970.
One explanation is that today’s science is not being translated into applications.
Up until the 1970’s large American corporations invested in scientific research that resembled, and sometimes exceeded university research, e.g. AT&T’s Bell Labs.
Large firms’ withdrawal from science resulted in its share of R&D falling from 30% in 1985 to below 20% in 2015.
We’ve moved from an economy where big firms did both scientific research and development toward one with a starker division of labor, where corporations specialize in development, and universities specialize in research.