On Sun, 22 Aug 1999, Patrick Wilken wrote:
> Can you give some figures? I would be interested what the larger companies
> spend on r&d.
A corporation might spend anything from 0% to 70%+ on R&D. If you are a law firm it is probably close to 0; most "R" you do gets billed directly to the customer so the customer is really funding the "R", little "D" required unless you are changing over to a paperless office. On the other end of the spectrum, a startup in a hightech industry spends almost all of its money on R&D. Hitech/rapid change industries (computers, biotech, etc.) must do a lot of R&D to remain competitive. Low tech (food, most disposable goods, etc.) spend more of their money on marketing to remain competitive.
>
> >Corporate research has far oustripped government research, as the
> >current new economy has educated them to the value of it. Nationalized
> >businesses in other countries are being gutted of basic research in
> >order to fund the baby boomer choke point of the welfare trough.
>
> I would be interested in seeing figures. I don't pretend to have an in
> depth knowledge of how money is spent on r&d (either here or abroad).
If you want the figures for the U.S. I think the government overall has a $70-90 billion dollar research budget. Much of that does in fact trickle down to the University level. For example Nat. Inst. of Health is up to around $15 billion/yr and almost all of that ends up at the Universities. If you take the semiconductor industry (worldwide), it has revenues around $230 billion, spending an average of 13% of revenues on R&D (~$30B). I think the Pharmaceutical industry may be a little larger or has a higher R&D percentage because they are perhaps at $20-$25 B/yr on R&D.
Robert