Found at “Steve Blank No Science, No Startups: The Innovation Engine We’re Switching Off” on 2025-10-14T09:47:14+02:00.

Interesting reason behind the proliferation of research labs. In retrospect, this makes total sense.

In the 20th century, U.S. companies put their excess profits into corporate research labs. Basic research in the U.S. was done at Dupont, Bell Labs, IBM, AT&T, Xerox, Kodak, GE, et al.

What I think is even more interesting is why most (or all) of the research labs ceased to exist.

This changed in 1982, when the Securities and Exchange Commission ruled that it was legal for companies to buy their own stock (reducing the number of shares available to the public and inflating their stock price.) Very quickly Basic Science in corporate research all but disappeared.