There is only one US company in the 1997 Top 20 R&D Companies list outside of these industries. It might surprise you to find out that the top 2 are about as "old economy" as companies come -- they make autos. Even though GM and Ford run low margin businesses (20% and 18% gross margins, respectively), they invest heavily in R&D. About 5% of revenue.
In a previous post, I compared R&D spending among countries. It is no wonder that the countries with the highest ratios of R&D spending versus the economy (Japan, Germany, the US) have large auto industries. It is also no wonder that the state with a high auto industry concentration -- Michigan -- has the third highest ratio of spending on R&D versus Gross State Product. The two states higher are New Mexico and Washington, D.C., both of which are special cases and are in any event small.
The rest of the top 20 companies have changed over the last 6 six years and fit the bill of "new economy" companies. Lucent halved its R&D spending and probably is no longer in the top 20. Motorola spends about as much now as it did then. Microsoft has tripled R&D spending (and keeps announcing that it will add much more). Intel and the drug companies have doubled R&D spending. Going forward, we can guess that US R&D spending will continue to grow, since most of these companies are growing revenue healthily and they spend a high percentage of their revenue on R&D. For instance, in contrast to GM's spending 5% of revenue on R&D, Microsoft and some of the drug companies spend about 15%.
Getting back to the international footrace, most companies in our economy spend almost nothing on R&D. These companies seem to do just fine in profits and losses, so I can guess that the success or failure of most countries' economies does not rest on R&D spending either. The US wants the whipped cream on top of its economic pie, which I think is important, but R&D and big science have a cost and benefit attached like all other endeavors. It's important to remember this, when these companies start munching at Uncle Sam's trough.
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