There’s a subtle distinction between freedom to suggest ideas and freedom to pursue ideas

# §Bell Labs Model

### Questions
- [[Why was Bell Labs Different?]]
- [[Why hasn’t Bell Labs been replicated?]]
- [[Was Bell Labs an anomaly?]]

### Conclusions
- [[Bell Labs and AT&T had timescale alignment]]
- [[Bell Labs is one of the few examples of an innovation org that was aligned with its money factory]]
- [[Bell labs had a budget of five billion 2020 dollars]]
- [[Bell Labs was only profitable in conjunction with AT+T]]
- [[AT+T benefitted significantly from creating better technology]]
- [[Regulation drove many of Bell Labs’ actions]]
- [[All the work at Bell Labs needed to tie back to the system]]
- [[Bell Labs empowered young people]]
- [[Bell Labs hired people before they had a role or expertise]]
- [[The work at Bell Labs that was most valuable to AT+T and the work that was most valuable to the world was fairly disjoint]]
- [[The famed bell labs research was a fraction of their activity]]
	- [[Bell labs was primarily not researchers]]
- [[Bell labs brought many disciplines together under the same roof and broke down barriers between them]]
- [[Bell Labs did not give researchers complete freedom]]
- [[Bell labs asked people to do useful things but left them room to say huh that’s funny]]
-  [[Bell Labs management was extremely light]]
- [[Bell Labs didn’t have a unique model]]
- [[Bell Labs selected for people with only academic pedigrees and with a sense of adventure]]
- [[Bell Labs was not a business]]::NW::
- [[Bell labs existed before continuous improvement was expected]] ::NW - stub::
- [[Bell Labs was a dance of individuals and institution, prototyping and manufacturing, invention and discovery]]::NW::
- - [[Bell Labs enabled free radicals]]



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Bell Labs is one of the few examples of an innovation org that was aligned with its money factory

AI research is an exception to the decline of corporate R+D

Regulation drove many of Bell Labs’ actions

Bell Labs was not a business

Bell Labs enabled free radicals

The famed bell labs research was a fraction of their activity

All the restrictions the US imposed historically to counter monopolies are the business models of tech companies today

Architecture matters for creativity

One function of a private ARPA is to fill in the gap once filled by corporate R+D

Good quotes

Bell Labs selected for people with only academic pedigrees and with a sense of adventure

One way for an R+D org to address existential threats is to tie into a core product

The Idea Factory

Bell Labs

§Bell Labs Model

# Was Bell Labs an anomaly?
### Related
- [[Why hasn’t Bell Labs been replicated?]]


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Bell labs asked people to do useful things but left them room to say huh that’s funny

Was Bell Labs an anomaly?

# Why hasn’t Bell Labs been replicated?
Is this actually true - could you argue that PARC was a replication of Bell Labs?
- [[Regulation drove many of Bell Labs’ actions]]
- [[Conversation with Daniel Windham 31/10/2019]]

### Answer
My answer is that no R&D labs *working on physical technology* meet the conditions  necessary to create a high-quality corporate R&D lab. [[Healthy corporate R+D requires a trifecta of conditions]]. Note that [[AI research is an exception to the decline of corporate R+D]]. 

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Ben's working notes

Was Bell Labs an anomaly?

Related

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