Intel Research: Exploring the Future
This report discusses the case study ‘Intel Research: Exploring the Future [1], published in 2005 by the Harvard Business School. The discussion is divided into three different sections: overview, analysis and conclusion.
1-Overview
In 2013, Intel spent more than 10.6 billion in Research and Development (R&D), and became the third biggest spender in R&D. Intel invests in R&D to get on with Moore’s Law, an observation by company co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965 that computing power doubles every two years. As the company works to cram more transistors onto its circuits, development eats most of the company’s R&D spending. “It’s getting more expensive to do the development piece of it …show more content…

Therefore Intel has a policy to only give grant to the project that someone has interest inside Intel on it.
Another issue is answering to variety of ideas that comes from university grant projects or Intel’s own labs. To answer this problem, once a promising research is detected, a set of efforts which named as sector were coordinate around the strategy. Then these efforts can be future university grants or internal research efforts inside Intel which called Strategic Research Projects (SRPs).
SPR’s fund is coming from Intel Research budget, but SPR’s are leading by a staff in the Intel’s existing labs with a team of 5-10 people to a specific target. After achieving the target, the corporate decides what to do with the context of the sector and if they think that is too early to move to the next stage, they stop the sector.
Tennenhouse was concerned that selecting university grants by an Intel committee may cause that those that were funded won’t show the diversity that a real disruptive innovations needs. Therefore he set up a number of labs close to existing universities, where Intel employees, academics and graduate student could work together. This labs are called “Lablets.”
The first two Lablets at the University of California, Berkeley and The University of Washington, Seattle opened in 2001. And by 2004 two more had opened near Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Cambridge