Outside of AI, companies are doing less research and more development

If you've been following the headlines in the world of AI, you might be fooled into thinking that corporations are doubling down, rather than withdrawing, from pure research. But on the ground, things are considerably more complicated -- tech companies are spending more on the development part of R&D while relying more on cash strapped universities to move the needle on research. The Golden Goose Project, a new data visualization effort from Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, attempts to highlight this paradigm shift with patent and research output statistics as well as data quantifying how research is applied, both inside companies and in the broader ecosystem. For example, you can see how IBM's patent output rose continually while publications involving employees peaked and fell off around 1992. But while all of this data underscores a decline in corporate research, it doesn't indicate that corporates are becoming any less innovative.