Essays, Interviews, and Articles
- The Rise and Fall of Industrial R&D Labs — From Bell Labs to Google Ben Southwood, Works in Progress
- Why does DARPA work? Benjamin Reinhardt
- Timing Technology: Lessons fromt the MIT Media Lab Gwern
- The Manhattan Project: Making the Atomic Bomb United States Department of Energy
- Funding Breakthrough Research: Promises and Challenges of the ARPA Model Pierre Azoulay, Erica Fuchs, Anna Goldstein, Michael Kearney
- Kelly's 14 Rules and Practices — Skunkworks Lockheed Martin
- Inside the PARC: the `information architects' – Xerox PARC Tekla S. Perry, Paul Wallich
- [Twitter thread] Interested in bringing back Bell Labs? Ilan Gur (Activate.org)
- One year, 1 lab, 16 spinouts (George Church Lab) Laura DeFrancesco, Nature Biotech
- A Brief History of Industrial Research (Edison, Bell Labs, ARPA, PARC) Adam Wiggins, Ink & Switch
- 📽️ The Torch of Progress — A Brief History of Industrial Research Adam Wiggins and Jason Crawford)
- 📽️ Talks at Google — The Idea Factory (Bell Labs) Jon Gertner
Books
- The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation Jon Gertner
- One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon (Apollo Project) Charles Fishman
- Scientific Freedom: The Elixir of Civilization (BP Venture Research) Donald Braben
- Book review from Nintil here
- Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos (Santa Fe Institute) Mitchell Waldrop
Modern Research Labs
- Protocol Labs Research
- 📽️ Innovation Pipelines and Incentive Engineering Lightning Talks (Juan Benet)
- 📽️ Protocol Labs Research Overview (Evan Miyazono)
- Ink & Switch — Applying the "Hollywood R&D Model"
- R&D Labs Concept Sketch (PDF)
- 🎧 Rethinking R&D with Adam Wiggins (Idea Machines Podcast)
- Focused Research Organizations (Adam Marblestone and Sam Rodriques)
- Project Whitepaper
- 🎧 Focusing on Research with Adam Marblestone (Idea Machines Podcast)
- A Private ARPA (PARPA) User Manual
- PARPA 2-Pager (PDF)
Meta – On Labs, Models, and Strategies for Research
- No Revival for the Industrial Research Lab Applied Divinity Studies
- Ingredients for creating disruptive research teams (featuring case studies on RAND, Santa Fe Institute, PARC, Bell Labs, Skunk Works, Los Alamos Lab, Kahneman & Tversky) Stefan Torges
- Readings and notes on how to do high-impact research Michael Aird
- The Independent Researcher Nadia Eghbal