I found that my career at Bell Telephone Labs thrived because of the environment, which encouraged cooperative research, offered opportunities for access to sophisticated equipment, and fellowship.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Bell Labs was an astonishing place for many decades, though it fell on somewhat hard times during the telecom meltdown some years ago, as its corporate owner had to cope with shrinking markets.
I sensed my chance and embraced the telecom business. I started marketing telephones, answering/fax machines under the brand name Beetel, and the company picked up really fast.
In 1989, I retired from Bell Laboratories to become a full-time writer. Not that I didn't enjoy my engineering career, but rather I liked being a novelist just a bit better.
But while doing that I'd been following a variety of fields in science and technology, including the work in molecular biology, genetic engineering, and so forth.
I wanted to go out and experience the fields.
While the lab plays an enormous role, research is also influenced by inner peace of mind and one's family environment, depending on what stage of one's life and career a scientist is at.
When I was in graduate school in consumer science and math, all of the big companies had labs, all doing blue sky research.
I was very fortunate to be elected to the Society of Fellows at Harvard, which is, in effect, a small research center where you are given three years to do whatever work you want.
I'm an engineer turned entrepreneur who's passionate about connection.
I literally worked at research labs where the staff really tried to steer management away from the modern technology that was actually better.