Industrial R&D: the new priorities

Commercial research institutions throughout the industrialized world have suffered cutbacks both in the number of working R&D scientists and engineers and in funding from their parent companies. No longer the ivory towers of the past 40 years, industrial laboratories of the ´90s are fast paced, market driven, and highly competitive. Here, the author presents the new outlook of industrial laboratories, focussing on consortia and alliances, the establishment of more laboratories by businesses in countries other than their own, university research, and the post-Cold War role of government research institutions.<>