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Bell labs research adapts to 21st century.

Article Excerpt
Just a few decades ago, AT&T's Bell Labs occupied the summit of industrial research. On a sprawling New Jersey site that resembled an academic campus more than a commercial laboratory, the organization's staffers not only produced breakthrough technologies for telecommunications--including, for example, the invention of the transistor and an understanding of the electronic structure of glass and magnetic materials--but such key advances in fundamental physics as demonstration of the wave nature of matter and discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation. All four advances earned their progenitors Nobel prizes in physics and sealed the organization's reputation as world leader in the R&D enterprise.

That status was destined not to last. In the 1980s, other industrial laboratories began to emulate Bell Labs' versatility. IBM's researchers, for example, earned two Nobel prizes of their own in that decade. But at the same time the time horizon of the entire research enterprise was shortening. Funders of both academic and industrial R&D demanded more predictable short-term gains at the expense of riskier long-horizon research.

So it was not surprising that, when AT&T was broken up in 1984, the nature of Bell Labs began to change. The organization became the property of Lucent Technologies, one of three spin-offs from the old company. It continued to combine pure and applied research, but put...

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