Why do companies struggle to use ideas produced by universities? The loss of the corporate lab is one part of the answer. Such institutions were home to a lively mixture of thinkers and doers. In the 1940s Bell Labs had the interdisciplinary team of chemists, metallurgists and physicists necessary to solve the overlapping theoretical and practical problems associated with developing the transistor. That cross-cutting expertise is now largely gone.
~ via The Economist

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In the post-war period higher education played a modest role in innovation. Businesses had more responsibility for achieving scientific breakthroughs: in America during the 1950s they spent four times as much on research as universities.
~ via The Economist

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A new paper by Ashish Arora, Sharon Belenzon, Larisa C. Cioaca, Lia Sheer and Hansen Zhang, five economists, suggests that universities’ blistering growth and the rich world’s stagnant productivity could be two sides of the same coin.
~ via The Economist

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