Will the commercial research lab ever make a comeback?

I have written about Bell Labs in the past, mostly wishing that something like Bell Labs still existed. A recent article in BusinessWeek wonders aloud how basic research can repair the American model as it wonders where Bell Labs disappeared to. From the article

The U.S. scientific innovation infrastructure has historically consisted of a loose public-private partnership that included legendary institutions such as Bell Labs, RCA Labs, Xerox PARC, the research operations of IBM, DARPA, NASA, and others. In each of these organizations, programs with clear commercial potential were supported alongside efforts at “pure” research, with the two streams often feeding one another. With abundant corporate and venture-capital funding for eventual commercialization, these research labs have made enormous contributions to science, technology, and the economy, including the creation of millions of high-paying jobs.

To some extent in the sciences, especially biotech, we have had a public-private model, but it’s not the one that is listed above. In some cases, it works well (see the number of companies that have come out of Stanford and MIT), but the relationship is not really symbiotic. It seems to be more of a handoff. What’s really missing from all this is the true research lab. Non-profit, or certain academic centers are the closest that come to this model, but in general, the semi-commercial research lab is not that common any more. Perhaps some of the work in the Hadoop and distributed data community, with companies like Yahoo and Facebook contributing data stores and distributed frameworks into the open source world via the Apache Foundation comes close, as might some of the efforts at research labs in some of the big software companies, but they are not contributing at the scale that Bell Labs did, or even IBM in it’s heyday.

I believe in the democratization of science and even more so in distributed innovation. It shouldn’t be purely in the hands of people with PhD’s, but at the same time, I think today’s generation of PhD’s and highly educated scientists don’t have that big research lab to look forward to. There are exceptions (places like the Joint Bioenergy Institute come to mind), or even a research position at a big software company, but in general, most PhD’s today don’t have the ambition or excitement of wanting to work at Bell Labs (which hired 1000′s of people). The reality of business seems to rule out that model with companies being smaller and monopolies being disbanded. But I can’t help think that there must be a way to bring some of that magic back.

So, what models would work. The article lays out some possibilities, but doesn’t really talk about the life sciences. Is the national lab model the best one, or institutes like the J. Craig Venter Institute, or HHMI‘s Janelia farms, or ISB? In my experience, with a few exceptions, individual PI’s in those institutes still work within traditional funding models, which are great for a particular form of science, but don’t exactly encourage the cutting edge think tank model. Hari and I have talked about science being incremental, but I think even inside incrementalism, there is an opportunity to do things differently. Or maybe I am just nostalgic.