Industrial Research

Research programs in industry must be protected from interruptions that might follow minor fluctuations in the business cycle, according to Harry A. Winne, General Electric’s vice president of engineering, who delivered the keynote address of an industrial research conference sponsored by Armour Research Foundation during the Centennial of Engineering celebration at Chicago in September. Stressing the need for industry to invest an adequate portion of its profits in research, Mr. Winne urged that industry foster the kind of intellectual and physical environment that is essential to creative work and to make a place for free and uncommitted investigations. He cited figures from studies by the National Research Council indicating that industry spent more than one billion dollars on research in 1950 and employed some 165,000 scientists, engineers, and technical assistants in industrial laboratories—more than twice the number similarly employed in 1940 and almost ten times as many as in 1927. Pointing out that every one of America’s one hundred largest industrial corporations have research programs, he said that the research investment expressed in terms of percentage of sales varies from one‐half to four percent, with the average lying between one and two percent. Mr. Winne also urged the cultivation by industry’s top management of a full understanding of the essential and relative characteristics of fundamental research, applied research, and advanced development.