Engines of Tomorrow: How the World's Best Companies are Using Their Research Labs to Win the Future

Engines of Tomorrow, by former Business Week technology editor Robert Buderi, is a serious look at the role corporate research plays in long-term business success. Despite a perception that such activity has been dramatically scaled back in recent years, Buderi says, the opposite is actually true among today's global business leaders; in truth, he notes, there are now almost 13,000 corporate labs in the U.S. alone, employing some 700,000 scientists and engineers who spend about $150 billion annually. And, he writes, this is "the prime venue where New Knowledge is converted into Useful Products, and where success and failure can be most plainly gauged in terms of patents, market share, sales, stock prices, and the like." To support his contention, he goes inside more than two dozen facilities at nine of the biggest innovators in the U.S., Europe, and Japan--IBM, Siemens, NEC, Lucent Technologies, General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, Xerox, Intel, and Microsoft--where he examines "management philosophies, funding paradigms, incentive programs, and all the rest" employed by the leading labs. Recommended for anyone interested in the underlying factors that actually drive corporate growth. --Howard Rothman