R&D Architectures

19 June 06

"So many of these lavish old commercial buildings have a great history to them, and then one day their useful life is over."

Michael O’Neil, CEO of Preferred Real Estate Investments, in The New York Times, 13 June 06

One of the most fruitful locations for commercial innovation will soon be demolished.  Over the past 44 years, Lucent’s Holmdel facility has been home to an astounding number of significant technical breakthroughs, from the laser and fiber optic cable to satellite communications and touch-tone dialing.

The Holmdel building, built in 1962, reflected the dominant thinking of the time on how to organize commercial research.   Basically, Bell Labs (Lucent’s corporate predecessor) hired the best science PhDs from the best research universities.  It then put them together in a 2 million square foot research building designed by a noted architect, Eero Saarinen, and nestled into a 472 acre campus in rural New Jersey.  At its peak, in the mid-1990s, Lucent employed 5,600 people at Holmdel. 

Here’s a picture of the Holmdel facility back when the parking lot was full:

Bell Labs Holmdel Research Facility ca 1990

(the white water tower at the top of the picture was designed to resemble a transistor…)

            The company that bought the site, Preferred Real Estate Investments, specializes in buying properties whose buildings have outlived their functions.  Century-old factories are converted to office space or condominiums, for example. 

For big research labs like Holmdel, however, there’s no good alternative use – it’s easier to demolish the building than try to convert it to something else.   The developers envision several smaller new buildings on the site, perhaps a few corporate headquarters.

            Companies are still investing in new research.  But instead of the Holmdel model of large isolated research facilities, much of the new research investment is going into smaller buildings in areas that already contain other research activities.   Most of these areas are outside the US.

            For example, here’s a picture of Microsoft’s newest research facility, established in January, 2005, in Bangalore, India:

“Scientia,” Microsoft’s Bangalore Research Facility

            Rather than being isolated on its own campus, Microsoft’s facility is on a main road, just down the street from the Indian Institute of Science.

            IBM’s Indian research facility, established in 1998, is even more embedded into a larger research environment – it’s located on the New Delhi campus of the Indian Institute of Technology.

These new research spaces are notable for their smaller size and integrated location.  The settings are urban rather than pastoral.  Innovation, of course, often has an element of serendipity to it. Thus the new physical location of research labs puts researchers in close proximity with knowledge workers from other companies and research institutions.

            The management decisions underlying these changes reflect an increasing desire for interaction between researchers from a variety of different organizations and perspectives.  In fact, an eighty year old candy factory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just down the block from MIT, was, in 2002, turned into a research lab, the headquarters of the Novartis Institute for Biomedical Research.

From Candy Factory to Research Lab - Novartis

          In the 1960s and 1970s, big integrated labs were able to undertake major projects without needing outside assistance.  The new open approach to innovation stresses the economic value of collaboration across institutions.  These are reflected both in the design and location of new research labs and in the obsolescence of old research campuses like the one that served so productively for nearly half a century in Holmdel, New Jersey.

More Information:

1. I did an update on the dis-integration of R&D earlier in 2006.  It’s here.
2. The New York Times story on the impending demolition of Bell Labs’ Holmdel facility is here.
3. More on the transistor-like water tower at Holmdel is here.
4. For more on Open Innovation, visit Hank Chesbrough’s web site at Cal Berkeley.
5. Here’s a link to the Novartis Institutes of Biomedical Research web site.
6. A link to the IBM research facility in India is here.