Word: productive
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...gross national product rose to an annual rate of $28.3 billion, indicating a 6% increase over last year's record...
...Industrial Research, with an annual volume of $1,100,000; now such institutions total 48, take in $100 million yearly. Moreover, the total U.S. research effort is growing at the rate of 10% to 12% a year v. an average annual increase of 3% in the gross national product...
Applied research can often turn migraines into moneymakers. In the manufacture of chlorinated biphenyl, widely used for insecticides, Monsanto's Anniston, Ala., plant was swamped by a useless fluid residue. But when researchers found a new product, HB-40, that uses the waste fluid to give greater flexibility to plastics, Monsanto salvaged twelve million pounds of stored-up residue, started making the onetime waste product...
Despite the task force approach, research is not a monopoly of the big companies. Many small companies that cannot afford full-scale research programs of their own can hire top outside brains to solve their scientific problems. Companies such as B. F. Goodrich and General Dynamics specialize in product development to fit other companies' requirements. Even corporations with their own big laboratories often hand over research projects to scientific contractors such as Boston's famed Arthur D. Little Inc. (1955 gross: $11 million), whose 800-man research staff has developed products ranging from rubber cement to a better...
...does management decide whether research will pay off? Says one executive: "You're always on a tightrope. Either you spend too little for research and your product is years out of date, or you spend too much and it's years from production." To cut the average ten-year time lag from test tube to cash register, most companies rigorously analyze even the most promising leads in terms of cost, marketability, timeliness and practicality, reappraise the potential new product at every stage of development. At Bell Labs, systems engineers spend years checking research developments against rival theories...