Engines Of Tomorrow
How The Worlds Best Companies Are Using Their Research Labs To Win The Future
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- 14,99 €
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- 14,99 €
Publisher Description
The U.S. economy is the envy of the world, and the key to its success is technological innovation. In this fascinating and in-depth account reported from three continents, Robert Buderi turns the spotlight on corporate research and the management of innovation that is helping drive the economy's robust growth. Here are firsthand communiqués from inside the labs of a reborn IBM, resurgent GE and Lucent, research upstarts Intel and Microsoft, and other leading American firms -- as well as top European and Japanese competitors.
It was only a few years ago that competitiveness experts -- U.S. well-wishers and naysayers alike -- concluded that America had lost its business and technological edge. The nation's companies, they asserted, couldn't match the development and manufacturing efficiency of overseas rivals. Yet now the nation is humming along, riding an unparalleled wave of innovation.
Buderi tells us this turnaround has come on many fronts -- in marketing, sales, manufacturing, and the creation of start-up companies. But Engines of Tomorrow deals with a central element that has gone largely unexamined: corporate research. It's the research process that provides the technologies that spur growth. Research is behind the renaissance of IBM, the stunning growth of Lucent, and much of the steamrolling American recovery.
Focusing on the fast-moving communications-computer-electronics sector, Buderi profiles some of the world's leading thinkers on innovation, talks with top inventors, and describes the exciting technologies coming down the pike -- from information appliances to electronic security and quantum computing. In the process, he examines the vital strategic issues in which central labs play a determining role, including:
• How IBM's eight labs around the world figure in Lou Gerstner's plans to achieve consistent double-digit growth -- and to join GE as a $100 billion concern. • Why Xerox's famed Palo Alto Research Center is vying to resuscitate its company's lagging fortunes by sending anthropologists into the field to study the hidden ways people really work. • What Hewlett-Packard will do without its original instrument business, recently spun off as Agilent Technologies. The business was central to HP Labs' MC2 philosophy of merging research expertise in measurement, computation, and communication -- and its departure removed a lot that was unique about HP. • How the November 1999 federal court finding that Microsoft operates a monopoly hinders the Seattle giant's acquisition plans and makes it increasingly vital for nine-year-old Microsoft Research to lead the way in innovating from within. Could this be the next great lab for the twenty-first century?
With authority and undaunted optimism about the underlying vitality of the research process, Buderi discusses these issues and reveals the future of some of the world's best and most powerful companies.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This illuminating history of corporate research and development divisions by former Business Week technology editor Buderi (The Invention That Changed the World) shows that despite the widely held perception of cut backs in R&D, these labs are not only here to stay but are central to the economic survival of leading companies like GE, Siemens, IBM, Microsoft and NEC. There are now close to 13,000 corporate labs in the United States alone, employing an estimated 700,000 scientists and engineers and performing close to 75% of all R&D in the country. Buderi's historical survey makes clear that the height of pure science research in corporate R&D departments during the 1950s and '60s was anomalous. Fueled by the attitude that scientists were gods and that scientific research should be conducted without imposing any controls, that research heyday came to an end with the arrival of harsher economic realities. During the '70s and '80s, amid the pressures of increased competition and horror stories of fruitless research at Xerox and Bell Labs, R&D divisions did in fact reduce their budgets. By the late 1990s, however, according to Buderi, the labs of IBM, Intel, Lucent and other industry leaders were thriving once more, although they now operate on a strict model of "science well-founded on areas likely to benefit the corporation." If only Buderi had applied the same model of efficiency he champions to his own book, it would have emerged as a less repetitious and more innovative work.