Telephony Live: Bell Labs president outlines future of innovation

CHICAGO — With a monkey and Mozart to illustrate his points, Dr. Jeong Kim, the president of Bell Labs for Alcatel-Lucent, reminded Telephony LIVE attendees that Bell Labs is far from dead and is focusing on overcoming new challenges and driving innovation for the next generation.

While research is often one of the first things to be cut during poor economic times, Bell Labs — the iconic research institution formerly with AT&T — has continued to flourish. The company has produced 11 Nobel Laureates, and its researchers continue to win awards and recognition for physics. “So to those who say Bell Labs is dead: Talk to my researchers,” Kim said, adding that the institution has a track record it’s proud of, but the challenge is how to move forward.

As part of an ongoing plan to redefine itself, the research arm of Alcatel-Lucent has been limiting the scope of its fundamental physics research division, eliminating its material and device physics group, which focused on developing new materials and processes for microelectronics. Today, Bell Labs is more leanly focused on the fundamentals of physics.

“Our goal is to be disruptive and work more towards the near term versus the longer term,” Kim said. “It’s really hard to predict the future without paying attention to the near term. If you look back at predictions, a lot of things didn’t turn out how we thought they would. … Innovation is an iterative process. You have to pay attention today to see how things will turn out in the future.”

This will take basic and applied research, as well as taking some projects all the way into development, he added. It will also take having a researcher in the company focused on ancillary markets to Bell Lab’s primary target, a researcher focused on the long term and a researcher devoted to thinking of disruptive technologies others might be working on. It won’t do the company good to dismiss a certain project because it is not directly related to telecommunications, Kim said. “Research has to be bigger than the company’s focus; otherwise we don’t bring the value to the company,” he added.