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National Resources Planning Board 



to combine the work of research and development"; 

 and "Our entire engineering organization constitutes 

 a research group working all the time toward these 

 objectives of better products at a more economical 

 price." 



And some hesitate to call anything research. Thus 

 one chief engineer writes: "Wliether the (development) 

 work outlined in the above paragraph would come 

 under the classification of research is a matter of 

 opinion. We do not classify any of our experimental 

 work as such, but undoubtedly some of it is purely 

 research"; and another says, "We believe that we 

 would be rated more as a fact finding or experimental 

 laboratory than a research laboratory in the pure sense 

 of the word," thus modestly declining to accept Dr. 

 Hirshfield's broad definition of industrial research. 

 This is the more remarkable in that tliis same man goes 

 on to say, "As differentiated from design engineers, we 

 have mechanical engineers in our laboratory who follow 

 the general principle of making critical expei'iments 

 with simple apparatus to prove a principle before this 

 principle is applied to the finished design. In most 

 cases a single principle of a multiple operation machine 

 will be explored, and when established, tests will pro- 

 ceed to the next principle. The results of these experi- 

 ments are all assembled in a final design and the appara- 

 tus is sent to the laboratory for testing and revision." 

 Many would feel that no better description of the spirit 

 and method of industrial research could be asked for. 



An interesting comment comes from the assistant 

 director of research of an aircraft company: "At the 

 outset it must be understood that the nature of research 

 differs widely in different fields. In the aeronautical 

 field the majority of work which we normally define 

 as 'design work,' and not as 'research' would be con- 

 sidered as 'research' in many other industries. This is 

 because the design of aircraft and their engines makes 

 constant use of new materials, methods, and processes, 

 so that the designing engineer is unable to refer to hand 

 books and much of the time cannot refer to standardized 

 practice. We do not consider the work of such men 

 as research although it might reasonably be regarded 

 as such." 



And finally the vice president of a large metals 

 industry company defines "The ideal (research) labora- 

 tory" as consisting of four divisions: (1) n fundamental 

 research division working "without relation to any 

 specific problem," (2) a division working "on special 

 specific problems of the particular industry which have 

 a sales value," (3) a liaison and development division, 

 the duties of which are to act as a contact between (1), 

 (2), and production, and to have charge of all experi- 

 mental installations which put into effect the ideas 

 developed by (1) and (2), after which they should 

 be turned over to the production departments, which 



should not be expected to do the development work, 

 and (4) a control-of-process and trouble-shooting depart- 

 ment. 



There is no question but that, under Dr. Hirshfeld's 

 definition of research as being "in spite of all the mys- 

 tery that has been thrown about it in recent years, . . . 

 nothing more nor less than an organized effort to 

 determine facts," a large proportion of the develop- 

 ment work in industry, and a certain proportion of 

 normal design work, deserves to be rated as industrial 

 research. 



New Products 



The invention, development, and commercial launch- 

 ing of new products is what is commonly regarded as 

 the major objective of industrial research, and practi- 

 cally every large, live industrial concern devotes a 

 considerable amount of effort and money to this phase 

 of its research program. Reports that have come in 

 to the effect that such research is being seriously under- 

 taken by industry are too numerous even to summarize 

 in this report. An adequate picture can be obtained 

 only by the quantitative type of survey that is being 

 undertaken by the National Research Council. 



It might be well at this point to call attention to 

 a vague but significant distinction between invention, 

 in the popular sense of a radical departure from previ- 

 ously existing products or processes, and development 

 of new products or processes that grow out of older 

 ones. Invention, in this sense, is the romantic, spec- 

 tacular side of new product research, but, commercially 

 speaking, it is relatively unimportant either in volume 

 or in fmancial return. The really remunerative new 

 products are usually the result of patentable or other 

 developments just ahead of the crest of current prac- 

 tice in well-established fields. Wholly new ideas, par- 

 ticularly those which lead to new industries, are few 

 and far between, and a long, hard road com.monly lies 

 between conception and commercial success. 



New product research and development is often care- 

 fully organized and systematized. Thus a manufac- 

 turer of agricultural machmery writes: "This company, 

 in its work in product development and improvement, 

 carries on a constant and continuing program of organ- 

 ized fact finding on which to build its program of de- 

 velopment. This fact finding begins, necessarily, in the 

 field with its customers to obtain from them the basic 

 data regarding the requirements of machinery they 

 would like to have. This information is then assem- 

 bled from all parts of the country, correlated and com- 

 piled, and then placed before new product committees 

 for individual machines. On these committees for 

 each important list of machines, sit an engineer, a repre- 

 sentative from the manufacturing department, and a 

 sales representative. This basis of fact then becomes 



