Why investing in basic research is crucial to technological advances – and a brighter future

If you dig deep enough, what we consider radical developments in fields including biotechnology, robotics, space exploration and quantum technology are not so radical at all. They can more accurately be described as evolutionary, in most cases tracing their roots to basic research that occurred decades ago.

Quantum is a timely case in point. A century after Erwin Schrödinger published his groundbreaking equation, it remains “physicists’ foremost window into the quantum realm, according to Scientific American.

Virtually every important technology we enjoy today has its roots in basic research. But such research is currently underfunded, putting us at risk of depriving future generations of important breakthroughs.

By its nature, basic research requires a long runway, which can be at odds with the interests of organizations focused on near-term profit. That’s one reason governments have traditionally been a major funding source for basic research – they can afford to take a long view.

In recent years, however, government funding for pure research has been diminishing. This reality was brought into stark view last year when the US National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation terminated or froze more than 3,800 research grants valued at some $3 billion.

While the fate of many of those cuts is tied up in court, they represent a continuation of a trend. At the turn of the 21^st century, the federal government funded about 60% of basic research in the US. By 2022, that figure had fallen to 40%. Similarly, in OECD countries, business research and development (R&D) spending is increasing far more rapidly than that of governments.

While that may not be surprising, it’s important to note that businesses generally focus their research on a specific goal, such as a new or enhanced product or service. It’s research aimed at hitting a specific target.

Pure research is a different animal. The idea is to recruit highly intelligent, accomplished scientists and researchers, then letting them pursue research topics they find interesting and follow the results wherever they lead. The belief is they will eventually hit on an important, even ground-breaking development.

There’s value in both approaches, but they present different risk/reward profiles. Most companies tend to favour the first approach because they are pursuing a defined market opportunity and want to focus their limited resources, which makes sense.

The second approach, basic research, takes longer to yield results and involves a much greater risk of yielding nothing of business value. It therefore requires more resources, but the results may be far-reaching and numerous. A single project can diverge into multiple tangents, each of which may be worthy in its own right. And the repercussions can last for decades.

Consider the transistor, invented in 1947 at Bell Labs, a pre-eminent example of a basic research organization. While Bell Labs cultivated the benefits of the transistor in its phone switching and transmission systems, the impact of the invention went much further.

In fact, it would be decades before we fully realized the promise of the transistor, which became the foundation for solid-state electronics, integrated circuits, memory chips and microprocessors. It took collaboration among academia, government and industry to bring the invention to its full potential.

Another classic example is the internet, which evolved from research at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), a US federal government precursor to DARPA.

In the 1960s, researchers at ARPA developed a communications network to connect the agency’s computers. The network was based on a new technology, packet switching, that itself evolved from the work of previous computer scientists.

In the 1970s, scientists Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf developed the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP). TCP/IP broke things open, enabling packets to flow between individual networks, no matter where they were located. While initially used solely in the academic world, the internet exploded in the early 1990s when it was opened up for commercial use, and we saw the development of key applications such as the World Wide Web.

The key to all these successes is the combination of basic research, where the seeds of innovation are discovered and planted, and the varied group of players who spend years cultivating those seeds into trees – in some cases, many different kinds of trees. It’s doubtful that Kahn and Cerf, for example, could have imagined that their work would spawn entire industries.

Indeed, none of the technologies we take for granted today – PCs, smartphones, the internet, e-commerce, AI – would have been possible without the foundational work of basic research.

Traditionally, basic research is driven by academia, typically with government funding. Yet, as in the case of Bell Labs, industrial players also take up the effort. That’s what we’ve been doing at NTT Inc. While we’ve always invested in research through our larger R&D organization, we took the effort a step further in 2019 when we launched NTT Research in Silicon Valley, which conducts basic research in three main areas:

The idea was to lay the groundwork for new technologies, with the aim of creating new businesses in 5 to 10 years. The location was purposeful, intended to tap into the rich information technology ecosystem, including talented researchers, educational institutions, technology companies and venture capital firms.

It’s a model that has proven successful. NTT Research recently created a new group, Technology Development & Incubation Hub (TDI Hub), to start taking promising technologies to market with partners in academia and venture capital.

With government investment in basic research declining, we need more industry players to invest in pure basic research. As the TDI Hub makes clear, this is not just some altruistic endeavour. With industry involved from the foundational stage, the scaling process can start earlier and development can move faster.

Clearly, not all companies have the resources necessary to pursue basic research, but many do. And others have the resources and expertise to contribute in their own way, such as on a specific project.

It’s time for industry players to take up the challenge and commit their resources to a greater good, pursuing a brighter future for humanity.