The Recession's Silver Lining

In research, as in life, there's no such thing as one size fits all. When we queried tech companies about our model, we found that few of them would be willing to adopt it. Impediments are often relics of the mind-set created in the last century.

Two main arguments came up again and again: Technology managers said they did not want to share intellectual property or research with competitors, and they did not want to spend money on what they could learn by attending conferences. A more fundamental issue was that many companies, particularly ones forced into short-term strategies, do not consider university research an important part of their business strategy.

By definition, the research performed in a collaborative university environment is shared by many players, including competitors—and potential future competitors. One perceived nightmare scenario, for a corporation, is that of a university professor or student forming her own company to exploit the tech breakthrough. Why should a company invest in research that also benefits its rivals? In terms of time and money, IP is the proverbial "giant sucking sound." Of course IP is critical, but what's often misunderstood is that its value depends entirely on the maturity of the technology. Guarding product IP like Cerberus at the gates of hell is not necessarily a wise strategy, especially for early-stage research, which occurs years before an innovation can be brought to market.

The problem here is that semiconductor companies are behaving as if they were pharmaceutical companies. With pharmaceutical discoveries, the early-stage IP is the most important; it would be unthinkable to share the development costs of a Prozac or a Celexa with a competitor. But in the semiconductor industry, no early-stage IP is ever "ready to wear." There's lots of cutting, fitting, altering, refitting, and realtering before it's ready for the runway. Xilinx chief technology officer Ivo Bolsens put it very well when he told us, "There are a hundred decisions and innovations that I will need to add before I can take an excellent academic idea and make it into a product."

Consider carbon nanotubes. These basic building blocks can be used in many different ways to develop countless different technologies and products. Patenting something so basic would be akin to patenting a brick. Builders can use the same brick to make castles and cottages. The outcomes are vastly different and do not depend in any way on whether that builder has the patent on the brick. And in that sense, the BiSFET device is a stellar example of the kind of early IP that companies are so unwilling to share. No one has even created the device yet—it's certainly not ready for commercialization. Like the brick, it could lead to a hundred different architectures. And we hope it will.

The other belief, that companies can gain access to early-stage R&D results at conferences, is even easier to dispel. What companies don't understand is that by the time their researchers read it at a conference, it's already too little, too late, and too limited. Too little because you see only the tip of the iceberg in the final results; too late because by the time it's in a paper the research has already been picked over for two years; and too limited—this is the most important point here—because you see only the path that resulted in the positive outcome. You want to be engaged with the full research, not just the condensed summary, boiled down to 20 PowerPoint slides and 20 minutes. You miss all the paths that were taken that were not successful—and that alone is worth the price of admission, because knowing all the dead ends to avoid could save a company millions. These kinds of negative results never get published at conferences.

Any company would be thrilled to achieve a 10 percent reduction in power between product generations. That number is typical of what evolutionary advances can accomplish at their best. Our national centers, by contrast, have enabled revolutionary and discontinuous advances in the last four to five years that haven't been seen for the last four or five decades.

With devices that perform far better than today's devices and yet consume a thousandth of the power, we could drastically reduce the consumption of power-hungry server farms that run today's critical Internet applications but consume enough power for a small city. We could realize "green" residential and transportation systems, a huge opportunity—or perhaps even a necessity, given that the world in 2050 may need 28 terawatts of power, compared with the 15 TW of energy we use today. We might enable a new generation of personal electronics that turn our beloved iPhones into dinosaurs. We might build implantable medical devices that never need external charging, which means they wouldn't require invasive surgery just to change the battery. The breakthrough research in the centers may even enable radical concepts like "energy scavenging," where the chip survives entirely on power it draws from its surroundings—that is, from the movements of the person wearing the device.

But none of this will be possible until companies let go of their outdated notions and downright misconceptions.

The challenge today is in finding sources of disruptive scientific innovation. At Bell Labs and the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, the seeds were planted for today's technology revolution. No one has the resources to replicate these today, but we believe we can make an alternative model of innovation, updated for the 21st century. It may very well be the key to an epochal change.