Didn’t mean to imply by any means that big companies or big labs are the only place where innovation happens: they are just one aspect of innovation. The point of this article was just to look at R&D labs, which by their nature tend to belong to bigger organizations–because that’s who can afford to support them.

We write about startups every day here and are well aware of their incredible innovations and risk-taking. But they have to be product focused–a startup needs to get a product out there and can’t usually sustain exploratory efforts, which is what I meant by “more open-ended.”

But you make a good point–I know well that there is no agreed-upon definition of what constitutes an R&D effort, hence my caveats. I just wanted to draw a line somewhere and act on the observation that more and more R&D labs seem to be popping up around Boston.

Startups often end up finding success in very different places than where they started looking for it (recall Microsoft got its start developing computer languages). By and large, they are doing real exploration, not “routine product development”.

Like the corporate labs, they take on high risk projects, and generally don’t see the results of their labors for 3-5 years.

A great deal of the innovation we see around us that we celebrate these days in tech (Google, eBay, Amazon, etc.) started with startups.

An interesting project for your intern would be to try to quantify and compare what fraction of innovation comes from startups vs. corporate labs.

Thanks for the comment. I’ve updated the Littleton entry and title, and added the Innovation Center.

Perhap you’d consider listing IBM’s Waltham site at 404 Wyman Street which houses IBM’s Innovation Center, our work around sotware storage from the XIV acquisition in 2008, and I believe there is chip work done at that site too for the industry’s leading gaming machines.