Bell Labs Research Regroups as Parent Lucent Shrinks

That refrain has been heard every time the company has splintered, and the worry about research becoming increasingly business-driven extends to all industry-based labs. This time, though, many industry watchers say Bell Labs is more at risk than ever of losing the breadth and freedom of research that have made it a magnet for top scientists.

“Pulling labs apart is like pulling apart spaghetti—you can’t do it without breaking some of the noodles,” says Stan Williams, a one-time Bell Labs researcher now at Hewlett-Packard Co, where, in 1999, he saw up close the splitting off of Agilent Technologies. “A research enterprise depends on its past integral. Research has an esprit, tradition, and a corporate memory of its own. Once segmented, it’s extraordinarily difficult to weld together.”

“Any time you get smaller, there is less buttressing from fluctuations of the market,” adds David Nelson, a physicist at Harvard University who has consulted for Bell Labs for 25 years. “As outside financial pressures strip layers of insulation off, it’s going to be harder to keep the diversity. Where is the next generation of exciting new ideas for hardware going to come from if they’re so focused on the bottom line? If you aren’t letting 1000 flowers bloom, you lose the capacity to respond to new challenges. You need lots of genetic diversity. This is a concern in the context of Lucent and other companies.”

Physical sciences research at Bell Labs “was interdisciplinary. There was a big sea that we fed off of and into,” says Philip Platzman, a theoretical physicist who has been at Bell Labs for 41 years. “Now it’s small, it’s good, and, most important, it’s still there. But the atmosphere has changed. The rest of Bell Labs is severely weakened. The Agere spin-off takes away everything connected with components—silicon, III–V semiconductors. … A third of the physics group went. And [Lucent] recently sold fiber optics. That’s another 50 people. What do I do now when I get a nice idea about fiber optics? There’s practically no one down the hall to talk to. I have to make arrangements with another company—that’s a barrier.”

“Look, I want the company to recover,” says William Brinkman, Bell Labs vice president of research. “We have gone through one of the worst periods a company can go through. We have survived. People are ignoring the fact that we had revenues of $6 billion last quarter when everyone else tanked. That’s a major accomplishment.” Lucent will keep investing 12–13% of its revenues in R&D, he says, though the “R” part is down a bit, and the company’s total revenues are way down.

It’s hard to deny that synergy is reduced, says Brinkman. Will university physics faculties still be peppered with Bell Labs alumni in 20 years? “Probably not,” he says. “The number of physicists here is not as big as it used to be. But I think we still have a broad spectrum of research in optical and wireless communications. In my own view, some of the stuff, say in organics, is still of Nobel Prize caliber. We think we can still create an environment to attract young people here to make a name for themselves.”

“It’s a different world, but it’s not necessarily worse or better. It’s at least as exciting,” says Federico Capasso, a 25-year Bell Labs veteran and vice president of physical research. “I actually view [the Agere spin-off] paradoxically as a terrific opportunity. It gives a chance to physicists [at Bell Labs] to see some of their inventions immediately have an impact. That is energizing. We are doing research both to impact the business on some timescale and also to continue to wave the Bell Labs flag. We are still the world’s strongest industrial lab.”

“I still love it here,” adds John Rogers, who came to Bell Labs nearly four years ago after a postdoc and now heads nanotechnology research. He ticks off a list of work in his department: single-crystal organic semiconductors, electrically pumped organic lasers, superconducting switches, electronic paper, biological microlenses.

“Bell Labs has been evolving its research program for nearly all of its 76 years. I think we’ll survive the latest tweak,” says press office director Michael Jacobs. Not surprisingly, scientists and managers speaking, per company policy, in the presence of a press officer painted a rosier picture than those speaking on their own, mostly anonymously.

The trend in industrial labs to increasingly couple research to business is neither new nor limited to Bell Labs. Observers point to IBM Corp, which cut back fundamental physics research some years ago, and to Xerox Corp, General Electric Co, and other shrinking industrial labs.

Says Platzman, “I think Bell Labs is the most fantastic place that ever existed. I am very distressed that it’s not what it was. People are leaving. They have offers at other places where they think they can have much better careers. I don’t know who has left in the week I’ve been away. And I worry that people will not continue to flock to Bell Labs. That would be a loss for the country, and for the world.”

Many physicists wonder if the breadth, vitality, and synergy that made Bell Labs the crown jewel of research labs can be re-created elsewhere. Universities should take over, says Bob Dynes, chancellor of the University of California, San Diego, who spent 23 years at Bell Labs. “But they don’t have their ducks lined up.”

Even Bell researchers and outside observers who are dismayed about the prospect of Bell Labs losing its place at the pinnacle of research concede that Lucent’s strategy of shedding divisions and focusing on Internet infrastructure may be the best bet for staying in business. “The crucial thing is how Lucent fares financially. They still have extraordinary people and extraordinary leadership. If the business is successful, it can afford to invest in research—which itself is necessary for the business to be successful in the longer term,” says Charles Shank, formerly of Bell Labs and now director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “And anybody who looks at telecommunications knows it has a very bright future.”