Research in the Industrial Corporation: II

Abstract

It is not easy to obtain any very exact idea of the scale on which corporations engage in research for the purpose of increasing the stock of invention. Most quoted figures of expenditure are for ‘research and development’; that is to say they group together the costs of invention, of development (including pilot plants) and of routine testing, production control and a wide variety of everyday tasks, often minor but sometimes very important, commonly known as ‘trouble shooting’. The proportion of this total directly devoted to real innovation will, of course, vary from case to case but it tends to be low.¹ Most industrial laboratories are small — in the United States, for example, more than one-half of them employ less than fifteen scientific workers — and in many of these it is more than likely that the whole, or the overwhelming proportion, of such costs are incurred in development or routine work. The number of firms in the world which, year in and year out, devote more than one per cent of their total costs to activities likely to emerge as inventions must be very limited.

What things can come into being, what things cannot — in short, what is the principle by which each thing’s potentialities are marked out, its boundary stone set deep down within itself. — Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, Book I.

[Later and more complete statistics of the kind discussed in this chapter are given in Chapter X. It may be said that the later figures add emphasis to the conclusions drawn from the earlier.]