academe

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Thu May 31 09:56:51 PDT 2001


Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> You don't find that sort of rampant self-delusion in
> R&D departments,

Hah -- some years ago the R&D department at Ameritech (actually, EDS was contracted to do the work) spent several hundred million dollars to create a new billing system, then scratched the whole thing as a complete loss.

How do you measure the efficiency of an R&D department? By luck? Would there be any way to collect statistics on the number of R&D projects that failed in the last 50 years?

Luck was how post-it notes were 'invented,' an accidental by-blow of a failed research program.

Carrol



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