Another name on all those papers is Raymond Beausoleil, an HP research fellow. The USC team, Beausoleil said, has helped fill a gap in photonics expertise in the company’s research program and accelerated its progress. He said that HP Labs has long worked with university professors, but that the outreach tended to be informal and ad hoc.
“Before,” he said, “there wasn’t necessarily a mandate to collaborate.”
Opening up is a good approach to some problems. But tight-knit teams inside corporate labs, experts say, can outshine the open model when working on multidisciplinary challenges in projects soon heading to market.
GE built up a biosciences unit, starting in 2004, to help push its diagnostic imaging technology to new commercial frontiers. Last year, GE and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center developed a prototype scanner that sharply cuts the time needed to digitize images on pathology slides.
Now, the GE researchers are working on the software and data analysis tools to look into such images for a deeper understanding of diseases. GE is collaborating with Eli Lilly and the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. But the core is a 15-person team at GE Research that includes computer scientists, molecular biologists, chemists and statisticians.
“It really helps to have the close and constant communications loops within the team, because engineers have to learn a lot of biology and biologists have to learn a lot of engineering,” said Fiona Ginty, a bioinformatics scientist who leads the project.
Probably more than any other company, IBM has successfully reinvented its R&D labs over the years, analysts say. Jolted by its early-1990s tailspin, IBM opened its labs to the outside world and to customers. Since the mid-1990s, it has sharply shifted its research focus toward its growth engines of software and services.
IBM is a major underwriter of open research in universities, but also collects more patents for its own use than any other company, year after year.
The open innovation model, said John Kelly, senior vice president and director of research, has many advantages. But he points to several innovations that became products after originating in IBM labs.
“You can’t leave discovery completely to others and to chance,” he said.
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