Depends on the Corp, some do legit cutting edge work, some really don’t do much actual research.

They couldn’t possibly develop cutting edge technology if they weren’t doing any research.

Sure we can laugh about Windows and Office being cutting edge, but they were at one point, and that’s why they still make bank by getting it on 80% of all computers (I’m guessing, don’t hold me to that number)

In France most software companies only pretend to do R&D in order to get lower taxes on some salaries. But it’s never research.

Sure. Why wouldn’t they?

I mean, some research isn’t very amenable to near-term use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_skies_research

Blue skies research, also called blue sky science, is scientific research in domains where “real-world” applications are not immediately apparent. It has been defined as “research without a clear goal”[1] and “curiosity-driven science”.

That’s harder to justify, hard to make a return on. For very long-term research, maybe you have an easier time with governments doing research.

But if you can produce valuable intellectual property that they can use, sure, businesses will hire you to produce stuff for their business. I guarantee you that businesses are going to be funding a whole lot of AI research right now, for example: what breakthroughs happen there will have enormous impact on things like whether or not OpenAI’s investments to get an early lead in hardware and datacenters pay off.

My own experience in private-sector research is that there’s a fuzzier line between research and development than you might think. That is, a company might want to have people in their labs directly facilitate research turning into product that can come to market.

But if you go out and look at, say, patent applications, you’ll find immense numbers filed by companies.

searches

Some numbers to support the above:

https://www.nsf.gov/nsb/updates/new-report-shows-business-rd-funding-dominates-us-rd

The United States is the largest performer of research and experimental development (R&D), with $806 billion in gross domestic expenditures on R&D in 2021, followed by China, with $668 billion. While overall funding of R&D in the U.S. continues to rise rapidly, the share of basic research funded by the federal government has fallen in the previous decade. Business funding of U.S. R&D surpassed federal funding in the 1980s and now dominates the U.S. R&D enterprise.

The business sector is by far the largest performer of U.S. R&D, performing an estimated $693 billion in 2022, or 78% of U.S. R&D. Nearly 80% of business investment is in experimental development – the stage when the promise of near-term commercial benefit is real.

It tends to be much more focused on bringing products to market, but of course they do. The transistor, the base unit of all of the microchips which make this conversation possible, came out of Bell Labs. And, as much as we might hate them for it, you have companies like Monsanto doing a lot of work on chemical engineering and genetics. Much of the work on AI (for good or slop) is being done in private sector labs now. Aeronautics research happens heavily in companies like Boeing and Airbus, though they are often working hand in hand with government labs (e.g. NASA, JPL, EASA).

Where Universities and Government really shine are areas like basic research and research which doesn’t have obvious commercial applications. Which is why support for those organizations is so critical. Those areas of research often have long term effects and can result in entirely new areas of knowledge, research and products.

It’s easy to think of large corporations as soulless organizations hell bent of accumulating wealth at the cost of anything else, because they are. But they are also surprisingly good at focusing wealth and effort to find new ways to do things cheaper, faster and more efficiently. Specifically because those things make money. Veritasium had a video on a good example of this recently.

Both have their names on RFCs and have developed many of the protocols we all use. To give them credit, the R&D backend side of things they are both pretty good at.

I’m not sure the research teams have anything to do with business models, or indeed research for what users actually want.

Yes they do, it is not as prolific as the public sector or universities.

Yes, many corporations do both internal research and development as well as research as a service. This obviously seems to include Microsoft and Google.

I wouldn’t says it’s junk science, whole cloth. But it is focused on making a profit. Which does differentiate it some with say university research.

DeepMind’s AlphaFold AI figured out protein folding.

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