In my experience doing and managing research inside large companies, corporate researchers report considerably less than they have already delivered to their product development colleagues. And they delay their reports to the public significantly -- until their own people have a good head start on commercializing their discoveries.
It's called "competitive advantage" -- and it is the primary raison d'etre for large firms' funding of research in the first place.
~~~~~~~~~~
A second strategy is the withholding of research results as "internal trade secrets" -- usually without even divulging the technology via patent disclosures! A significant number of my best discoveries are still being "held as trade secrets" by my former employers.
~~~~~~~~~~
And really savvy companies employ a third research strategy: patenting and licensing of "intellectual property". This is especially true for discoveries "outside the core mission" which provide no direct competitive advantage, but for which others are wiling to pay big bucks. For instance, check out the annual report of, say, Texas Instruments: an amazingly large fraction of their revenue is from "royalties". Savvy corporate managers are fond of saying,
"There's nothing quite as nice as 'IP' (intellectual property) revenue: discover something you don't need, license it -- and sit back and enjoy the checks rolling in every month..."
Curiously, there are / were even some (former) Fortune 500 companies who never grasped that third concept / opportunity...
~~~~~~~~~~
Independent paranoids like Rossi fear their ideas will be "stolen", and unless they are spectacularly successful early on, neither advance the (published) state of the art nor reap any benefits (except for scammed investments) from their efforts...
Note: You can't patent what you do not understand well enough to explain it in a patent application. (Fundamental research on principles and mechanisms is key to defending application patents...)
For instance, check out the annual report of, say, Texas Instruments: an amazingly large fraction of their revenue is from “royalties”. Savvy corporate managers are fond of saying, “There’s nothing quite as nice as ‘IP’ (intellectual property) revenue: discover something you don’t need, license it — and sit back and enjoy the checks rolling in every month...”
***A few years ago I worked for a $multibillion company that was recently acquired by TI. Their approach to IP was amazingly short sighted, focusing only on things that would become products. It wasn’t until a meeting between the field engineers and the legal department that the approach changed, because I pointed out to them that I had approached Legal on several patents that were outside of our own product scope. At the time, they were not interested. But during the meeting they claimed they WERE interested, that their focus all along was on generating patents. So I talked about several of my projects that were turned down. Their policy changed on that day. They had missed out on hundreds of patents from field engineers & others that could have generated revenue.
Perpetual motion machines don't qualify either.
Note: You can’t patent what you do not understand well enough to explain it in a patent application. (Fundamental research on principles and mechanisms is key to defending application patents...)
***You can patent flame throwers, ovens, and even internal combustion engines without understanding the plasma physics behind a flame. Care to explain what a flame is? We have been using it for thousands of years but explaining it is beyond the understanding of 99% of the population, including patent examiners.
Thanks so much for the professional, “inside view” dear brother in Christ! What you said stands to reason throughout.