"Corporate R&D never worked very well in the first place." Huh?!? The first public fax transmission, the transistor, the first synchronous-sound motion picture, UNIX, C and C++, low-cost fiber optic phone systems, the first Wireless LAN, and numerous laser techonologies were all products of Bell Laboratories corporate R&D.

And a lot of other potential big name developments never saw the light of day due to the "corporate" part of corporate R&D. Yes, it is true that corporate R&D produced a long lists of greats; however, some of these faced serious barriers to realization because of the hedging of risks that big companies do.

It's not to say they don't develop great things. What they do, they do well because they pour their resources into it. It's the daring, wild, revolutionary ideas that have become uncommon. The smaller company or group of hackers have become the suppliers of those.

Corporate R&D never worked very well in the first place. William Whyte wrote about how relatively unproductive it was way back in 1956 in The Organization Man.