Stick with me on this, and I’ll get to the B2B angle… I came across this article via either Digg or Reddit, two services I have been using heavily since attending O’Reilly’s eTech in San Diego this year. The “teaser” was that Bell Labs was to be in foreign hands!. Wow.

Apparently Bell Labs is part of Lucent, which may be purchased by France’s Alcatel. I remember the Bell Labs of my childhood and started wondering what had caused a change away from that massive corporate R&D model… I mean, if the once preeminent R&D lab of America might be bought by a foreign company, and you only stumble across that fact via RSS.

My theory is that the smart, motivated scientists and engineers go where they can “make it real”, and always have. Historically, R&D was vertically integrated, meaning that large organizations (governments, universities, multi-national corporations) were the ideal place to work on big ideas if you wanted to see them made real. Even though big was (and is) often associated to slow and cumbersome, at the end of the day those organizations had the capital and capabilities to get things done. But in the modern economy, networks of organizations are able to accomplish much the same thing — often without the inherent disadvantages of size. Cutting edge economic theory states that private equity capital and business process outsourcing (whether design, manufacturing, logistics, or even HR) can provide capital and capabilities to smaller firms that enable them to drive big ideas.

What is necessary to make that happen though is that companies must be able to form strong links to one another — as strong as those within a single large organization — that may last only for a single project. This requires a form of dynamic B2B (see, we’re getting there) beyond what traditional e-commerce has provided. Two recently published books cover this in great depth:

  • The Only Sustainable Edge by John Hagel III and John Seely Brown
  • Extreme Competition by Peter Fingar

    • Both of these books discuss the need to “dynamically form networks of partners”, to facilitate the kind of horizontal integration in new product introduction that has previously been mastered in the manufacturing realm. The challenge is that it is difficult to establish rich B2B connections at all, let alone quickly for single initiatives. If you agree with their theses though — and I do — we are all going to have to get much better at this.

    So how does this relate to Bell Labs? Previously in research, top people sought out the capital and capabilities that would enable their work as a source of profitable products — but one can suppose that going forward it is capital and capabilities that seek profit by enabling talent. The book assets of the former R&D powerhouse may be on the block, but I suspect much of the talent is now at the heart of networks of companies leveraging B2B technology.