Season's Musings

Somewhere in the not-so-distant past I wrote about the kinds of research happening in the world. To save you the click-through, they are:

• R&D, leading to products
• research, leading to inventions
• Research, leading to discoveries

Traditionally, these are associated with some kind of timeframe:


All your base are belong to us

As you might have heard, the research and innovation branch of the synergetic colossus Alcatel-Lucent has now become part of the new and improved Bell Labs. Due to different processes, this creates a vector field that will influence our curve:


Before you think I imply that fundamental is the opposite of innovative, let me clarify:

• "fundamental" stresses the long term benefits of dealing with general principles rather than practical application
• "innovation" focuses on the short terms gains of the successful introduction into society of an invention.

But this is a narrow 1D view! At Bell Labs, we should strive to go beyond this; these two forces, when combined with creativity can change the topology of our output:


The message: Everything we do should and can have both short and long term gains.

After reading this, you might conclude I took too many happy pills. Should you care? No, since the most important message is yet to come ... when we perform an affine transformation to a new basis:

Merry Xmas and a Happy New Year
(or Happy Yule, Hanukkah, Eid Mubarak, Kwanzaa or Rohatsu)