Word: researched
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Most of the important indicators are pointing down. The number of patents granted to U.S. citizens dropped from 56,000 in 1971 to 44,482 last year. Spending on research and development, which peaked at 3% of G.N.P. in 1964, was only 2.2% last year. While the U.S. percentage has been decreasing, West Germany's has averaged 3% annually since 1971, and last year increased to 3.2%. Japan's has risen from 1.3% in 1965 to 1.9% in 1977. Says Paul E. Gray, president-elect of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: "We have lost a certain edge...
Innovation means more than just new air-blown popcorn poppers or home computer games for a society already overrun with gadgets. America's dismal economic record over the past decade largely reflects the decline of research and new product development. Growth in productivity, which measures a worker's output per hour, depends upon new machines and industrial processes that help the worker produce more. While U.S. productivity increased at a rate of 3.1% annually from 1955 to 1965, it increased at only 2.3% from 1965 to 1973. So far this year, productivity has been declining at an annual...
...labyrinth of Government regulation has not only shifted research from new products to the "defensive research" necessary to comply with burgeoning environmental and safety rules, but has also increased the cost of bringing out new developments. Says Chrysler Chairman Lee lacocca: "I never invent anything any more. Everything I do is to meet a law." In the early '60s it cost $1 million and took up to five years to bring a drug through the Federal Drug Administration's regulatory maze. It now costs $18 million and can take ten years. As a result, the number...
...inventive capacity but the lack of businessmen willing to take the risk investments." The bottom-line obsession of many managers results in quick payoff investments to retool old products rather than expensive long-term spending to develop new ones. Though Texas Instruments this year will spend $155 million on research, Vice President George Heilmeier admits: "We have become conservative and spend less on basic research...
Some entrepreneurs also complain that corporate giants are indifferent to small projects. Harris J. Bixler, president of Boston's Avco Everett Research Laboratory, contends that new products that promise tidy but unextravagant revenues go unsupported by Big Business even though the initial investment might be low. Says he: "Large companies could care less about the guy who has a $100,000 idea. They'd lose that in the paper-clip account." Such technological triumphs as Xerography and Polaroid film were developed by small innovator-entrepreneurs only after larger firms turned down the ideas...