RE:FORTUNE 500 GUESSI'll bite.....I say Google....research below:....enjoy!
Spector even claims that his company’s secretive Google X division, home of Google Glass and the company’s self-driving car project (see “Glass, Darkly” and “Google’s Robot Cars Are Safer Drivers Than You or I”), is a product development shop rather than a research lab, saying that every project there is focused on a marketable end result. “They have pursued an approach like the rest of Google, a mixture of engineering and research [and] putting these things together into prototypes and products,” he says. Google can also draw on academia to boost its fundamental research. It spends millions each year on more than 100 research grants to universities and a few dozen PhD fellowships. At any given time it also hosts around 30 academics who “embed” at the company for up to 18 months. But it has lured many leading computing thinkers away from academia in recent years, particularly in artificial intelligence (see “Is Google Cornering the Market on Deep Learning?”). Those that make the switch get to keep publishing academic research while also gaining access to resources, tools and data unavailable inside universities.
Spector argues that it’s increasingly difficult for academic thinkers to independently advance a field like computer science without the involvement of corporations. Access to piles of data and working systems like those of Google is now a requirement to develop and test ideas that can move the discipline forward, he says. “Google’s played a larger role than almost any company in bringing that empiricism into the mainstream of the field,” he says. “Because of machine learning and operation at scale you can do things that are vastly different. You don’t want to separate researchers from data.”
It’s hard to say how long Google will be able to count on luring leading researchers, given the flush times for competing Silicon Valley startups. “We’re back to a time when there are a lot of startups out there exploring new ground,” says MacCormack, and if competitors can amass more interesting data, they may be able to leach away Google’s research mojo.
Google culture: you are what you do
The strategic thinking of most companies is shaped by the way they do business. For example, a farmer thinks in terms of annual seasons and crops; everything revolves around that yearly cycle. Manufacturing companies, the traditional foundation of a 20th century economy, plan in terms of big projects that take a long time to implement and require a lot of preparation. If you're building a car or a plane or even a smartphone, you have to plan its features well in advance, drive hardware and software to completion at the same time, and arrange manufacturing and distribution long before you actually build anything. The companies that build complex physical things naturally plan their products in terms of lifecycles lasting at least 12 to 24 months, and sometimes much longer.
That long planning cycle dominated big companies in the 20th century, and was driven into all our heads through generations of business books and business school classes. It's how most of our brains were formatted.
An internet company, like Google, works at a fundamentally different pace. Web software changes continuously. You don't plan it rigidly; you evolve it day by day in response to the behaviour of customers. The faster and more flexibly you evolve, the more successful your products will be.
This evolutionary approach, and the Agile design processes that support it, is built into the fibre and psyche of web companies. They don't think in terms of long-term detailed plans; they think in terms of stimulus and response.
This is a dramatic change in the history of business. In the past, the nimble companies were always the little ones. The larger your company, the more it valued planning and the long-term view. Google is one of the first very large tech companies ever to pride itself on rapid response rather than rigid planning.
Google loves companies like GGG because they provide the base for exploration materials and the capabilities they offer with their mysterious qualities......Apple evolved this way using NASA's REE magic!