How to do research in academia is well established. You get grants to fund your group, attract students, publish papers, and pump out PhDs. Depending on who you ask and how cynical they have become, the goals are some combination of impacting the field, educating students, and personal aggrandizement.
Research in industry is less established. How to organize is not clear. The purpose is not even well understood. The business strategy behind forming a research group sometimes seems to be little more than a variant of the underpants gnomes’ plan. Phase 1: Hire PhDs. Phase 2: ? Phase 3: Profit!
Generally, researchers in industry are supposed to yield some combination of long-term innovation, improving the sophistication of technology and product beyond simple and obvious solutions, and helping to attract talented and enthusiastic developers.
To take one example in search, without researchers who know the latest work, it would be hard for a company to build the thousands of classifiers that ferret out subtleties of query intent, document meaning, and spamminess, all of which is needed for a high quality search experience. Information retrieval is a field that benefits from a long history of past work, and researchers often are the ones that know the history and how to stand on the giants’ shoulders.
Even so, there are many in industry that consider researchers an expensive luxury that the company can ill afford. Part of this comes from the historically common organizational structure of having a separate and independent research lab, which sometimes looks to be a gilded ivory tower to those who feel they are locked outside.
The separate research lab is the traditional structure, but a problematic one, not only for the perception of the group by the rest of the company, but also because the researchers can be so far from the company’s products as to have little ability to have impact. Many companies appear to be trying other ways of organizing researchers into the company.
For example, Google is well known for integrating many of its researchers into product groups and shifting them among product groups, working side-by-side with different development teams. While on a particular project, a researcher might focus on the part of the problem that requires esoteric knowledge of particular algorithms, but they are exposed to and work on many problems in the product. When this group comes together, everyone shares knowledge, and then people move to another group, sharing again. Moreover, these ephemeral teams get people to know people, yielding valuable peer networks. When a tough researchy problem later comes up and no one nearby knows how to solve it, finding the person in the company who can solve it becomes much easier.
Many other companies, including Microsoft, Facebook, and Twitter, maintain separate research organizations, but try to keep the researchers working very closely with the product teams. At these companies, the impetus for novel research often is a problem in the product, usually a problem that would not be obvious in academia because of their lack of access to big data and scale.
What organizational structure works best in industry may depend on our goals. For immediate impact, having researchers integrated into product groups provides a lot of value; they are directly solving today’s hard problems. But, what about the problem that might hit in a year or two? And what about long-term breakthroughs, entirely new products, enabled by new technology no one has thought of yet?
My personal opinion leans mostly toward integrating researchers on projects, much like Google does, but also giving researchers 20% time (as all developers should get) and occasionally turning a 20% time project into a full project (again, as all developers should get, but the threshold for what is considered impactful might differ for a researcher, given the speculative gamble that is the nature of research). This strikes a balance between immediate impact, doing novel research, and taking advantage of a long-term opportunity when inspiration hits.
What do you think? How should researchers be organized in companies? Why?
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