When rumors began to fly about a merger between chemicalgiants Dow Chemical DOW 1.97% and DuPont DD 1.65% , it was obvious the deal wasnot your ordinary fee-driven scheme dreamed up by investment bankers. The twocompanies have 331 years of American history between them, with DuPont claimingthe title of fourth-oldest Fortune 500 firm.
But it’s not just their ages that distinguish thesecompanies. In an economy in which roughly 80% of GDP comes from the servicessector, these vaunted institutions actually make stuff—and perhaps moreimportantly, invest a lot in researching how to make better and more profitablestuff.
In the eyes of many investors in the U.S. today, however,the large research budgets of companies like DuPont are precisely what’sholding them back. When activist investor Nelson Peltz tussled with formerDuPont CEO Ellen Kullman earlier this year, R&D spending was a main talkingpoint. What Kullman defended as a commitment to science and solving the world’sbig problems, Peltz saw as empire building that DuPont’s investors could illafford. (When the dust settled, Kullman resigned.
Whether or not DuPont’s research budget was well spent,there’s plenty of nostalgia for the days when businesses were making hugediscoveries. Decades ago, DuPont invented nylon and Teflon. Dow, for its part,created Styrofoam. Americans are still fascinated by the centralized researchprograms of yore, like AT&T’s T 0.49% Bell Labs or the Xerox XRX 1.13% PARClaboratory, whose scientists’ work won Nobel Prizes and led to revolutionaryinventions such as the transistor and the computer mouse.
Today Bell Labs exists as a part of Alcatel-Lucent, but itsonce sprawling campus in Holmdel, N.J.—the site of early breakthroughs incellphone technology—has been converted into a mixed-use, new urbanist real estatedevelopment. Xerox PARC still calls Palo Alto home, but in 2002 it was spun offas an independent subsidiary and now engages in R&D on demand rather thanthe open-ended basic research that yielded some of its more famous discoveries.
Figuring out just how much corporate research has waned issurprisingly difficult. Look at R&D costs, and you’ll find that spending asshare of revenue has been fairly steady in recent years. But most Fortune 500companies don’t disclose that spending, and for the 95 that do, the category isso broad as to be not very useful. After all, R&D can include everythingfrom Bell Labs’ discovery of background radiation (which ultimately led to thedevelopment of the big bang theory) to Twitter’s sparkly new “like” button.
To get a better sense of the resources dedicated toresearch, economists Ashish Arora, Sharon Belenzon, and Andrea Patacconi lookedat the share of publicly traded corporations whose scientists publish inacademic journals. The findings, published in 2015, were alarming. They foundthat by 2007, just 6% of publicly traded companies were publishing research inscientific journals, down nearly two-thirds from 1980.
That, it turns out, is just fine with investors. Arora alsofound that after controlling for other factors, companies that engage in moreresearch are worth less in public markets. “Corporations value basic scienceless and demand less of it” than they did 35 years ago, he says.
How worried should that make us? Philip Auerswald of GeorgeMason University says the decline of R&D spending in recent decades isessentially a return to normal after overinvestment in mostly militarytechnology following World War II and during the Cold War.
Plus, the Nobel Prizes won by corporate research labs mayhave earned their parent companies prestige, but they don’t always make money.Sometimes it’s competitors that benefit—think Steve Jobs’ appropriation ofXerox inventions like computer desktop icons. The difficulty of monetizingdiscoveries has helped dissuade a generation of management from spending big onbasic research.
But while the fallout may not be readily apparent, thisdoesn’t mean it’s not severe. Less focus on corporate research has coincidedwith the decline in productivity growth that has been plaguing the U.S. economysince the middle of the last decade. Since 2004, growth in what economists callTotal Factor Productivity—or the measure of how well an economy combines laborand capital to create economic growth—has been half of what it was in the priordecade. IMF economists recently compared the productivity growth in variousAmerican states and found that those where R&D spending was the highestalso showed faster TFP growth.
With America’s economic rivals—in particular, China—showingno letup in their willingness to boost research and development, it may just betime to stop listening to investors betting on the short term and reignite theAmerican love affair with corporate science. “If we don’t do the basicresearch,” says Marc Kastner, president of the Science Philanthropy Alliance,“other countries will.” 
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