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Corning Opens Silicon Valley Listening Post
I just happened to find this BusinessWeek clip sitting on my colleague Sean Ness' desk last week when I was in town. Talk about the serendipity of proximity. How ironic, since the article is all about creating satellite labs in Silicon Valley to "suck up ideas".
Corning has a long history of innovation - almost two centuries, worth. But as the indsutrial revolution moved on, and left upstate New York behind, it has struggled in recent years to stay relevant.
"Now... as other manufacturers are pulling back on R&D, Corning is pushing ahead to find the next hit. Nearly 2,400 miles from its headquarters in Corning, N.Y., the company has set up a mini tech center in Silicon Valley. Working from the foothills behind Stanford University, 10 full-time researchers hope to hook up with folks at Google (GOOG), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), and Intel (INTC), among other high-tech giants based nearby, and pitch them on Corning's latest inventions."
The lab is focusing on three areas - fiber, solar panels for handheld devices, and better displays for mobile devices.
Unlike other offshore or satellite R&D labs, Corning's Silicon Valley group is more of a listening post: it "exists primarily to suck up ideas and then relay potential winners across the continent to develop them into products."
The "outreach venture", as its called, has been given five years at About $5 million annual outlay to show its worth - a sum BusinessWeek describes as " a rounding error at a company with $5.9 billion in revenue in 2007".
We're seeing more and more of these kinds of corporate R&D outposts popping up, not just in Silicon Valley, out in clusters around the world. This one, though is notable for its size - often these groups are just 1 or 2 people. Corning's move harkens back to the days of Xerox PARC, when the company invented the future, and then failed to cash in on it. The rest is history.