Industrial research is key to creating and combining scientific knowledge and technological know-how in regional systems of innovation. The corporate laboratory sits at the center of these systems of knowledge production and use, conducting scientific research and technological development activities in socially embedded and cumulative processes of learning. Focusing on two Silicon Valley laboratories and their respective research programs, this dissertation explores the role of the corporate laboratory in building regional innovative capabilities. The cases reconstruct and analyze two research programs, one in amorphous silicon and the other in advanced ceramics, carried out at Xerox's PARC and Raychem's Corporate Laboratory from the late 1970s to the late 1990s. Each exploration emphasizes the “R” in R&D—on creating new techno-scientific ideas and developing the capabilities for exploring those ideas—rather than on the “D”—on transferring fundamental research into product development and commercialization activities. In the process, a view of the corporate laboratory within a contextual, as opposed to the more traditional linear, model of innovation is set out, highlighting the corporate laboratory's critical role in cross-linking scientific research and technological development activities.
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