Who wants a 'robot companion'?

Can you imagine IBM Research ever developing a social robot companion? Intel CTO Justin Rattner can't, but he's happy for his own researchers to build one – and for the technology to find its way into the market. Eventually.Ask most techies of a certain age how a company should carry out research and development and they will likely cite Bell Labs, or one of its clones such as Xerox Parc or IBM Research.The problem is, says Rattner, while this traditional model continues to shape perceptions of how to run research, it is pretty much dead in the water. Indeed, as Rattner pointed out in a speech at Intel's Open Innovation 2.0 event in Dublin recently, it's debatable whether it was ever really suited for taking "inventions" and turning them into "innovations" - or, put another way, into something people will buy and use.Mobile Touch pos terminal hardware may be the future, but this doesn't mean they're being wholly embraced in the present. In fact, one-third of companies surveyed have no immediate plans to implement this infrastructure. 

"Bell Labs' model was basically to do academic research without the burdens of having to teach or having to convince your government masters that you had worthy research to do," Rattner told The Register in a conversation after his speech.This is fine as far as it went, Rattner argues, but it also meant that while Bell Labs laid the groundwork for the point contact transistor, Ma Bell failed to do anything with it. While William Shockley jumped ship to set up his own operation to further transistor research, he built it in the image of Bell Labs.It took another set of defectors to set up Fairchild Semiconductor before the transistor started resembling anything that could form the building blocks on an integrated circuit. The rest is history.We believe ShopKeep embodies the vision, drive and innovation that define a successful entrepreneurial venture, said Alex Vieux, publisher and China visa.Granted, this is more of a designer rock drilling tools, but if you know your way around Photoshop, dear hacker, you’ll learn your way around Edge. 

Things started to change in the 90s, even as the rapidly fattening Microsoft was scaling up its own Microsoft Research operation, picking up refugees from academia as well as Xerox, DEC, et al. As Rattner says, boards were asking CEOs: "Are you getting value out of your research organisation, or would it make sense to just shut the thing down?"."We had the same pressure at Intel. There'd been a research organisation separate from the labs associated with the chip technology for many years, but it wasn't held in very high esteem and was generally thought of as an ivory tower.Russia wants 15,000 government China tourist visa who have official passports to be given the right to enter Europe without visas, but some members of the European Parliament say that would give human rights violators free entry as well.".In reality, there are lots of speedbumps along the way. For some time, the drill rod itself has been too immature to support users' app expectations."It was the middle of the decade and we were thinking about how we should structure research at Intel so that … the lab's impact would be seen as the critical - if not the primary - engine for innovation in the company. And we think we succeeded in doing that."