Session Chair:  Thomas Theis, Director of Physical Sciences, IBM
Physicists and R&D managers overwhelmingly asserted in the American Institute of Physics’ five year study of the History of Physicists in Industry that academics DID NOT understand industrial research.  Perhaps this should not be surprising. Industrial physicists have long complained about being misunderstood in AIP’s publications.  This session is an attempt to create debate about the disparity between industrial scientists’ and academic historians’ perspectives regarding the nature and purpose of industrial research.

One reason for the misunderstanding on the part of academics may be the paucity of resources to study industrial R&D.  In our first paper, Joseph Anderson, AIP’s archivist surveys the state of records available to study industrial research and the problems in making those records available in his paper “Documenting Industrial R&D.”

However, the roots of the industrial/academic divide go further than simply inadequate resources to study industrial R&D and can be found in part in alternative constructions of the nature of research.  Drawing on AIP’s survey of over 100 Industrial Physicists and R&D managers Orville Butler, in “Research What? What Research? Changes in Industrial R&D,” looks at two models of industrial research and development widely held by industrial scientists and R&D managers.

Steve Adams, drawing on the same set of interviews suggests that industrial R&D may be falling into a trap which Clayton Christensen warned about in The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail.  Adams evaluates the changes in industrial R&D found by the AIP study concluding that American firms may have made themselves vulnerable to what Christensen calls disruptive technologies.

Margaret Graham, will comment.  Graham’s career has covered each of the realms discussed in the above papers.  She is currently associate professor at  McGill University’s Desautels Faculty of Management.  But she previously served as Manager of
Research Operations and Organizational Learning at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center and she is a founding Director of the Winthrop Group one of the premier archiving organizations serving industry.

The session will be chaired by Tom Theis, Director of Physical Sciences at IBM’s Watson Research Center, who will also participate in the discussion.