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“As other high-tech companies cut back on their research labs, Microsoft continues to increase its ranks of free-rein thinkers.

“The company, which has research labs in Redmond, Wash.; Beijing; Cambridge, England; Bangalore, India; and Silicon Valley, will announce plans on Monday to open a sixth lab, in Cambridge, Mass., in the Boston metropolitan area.

“These are labs where people focus on science, not product development. To lead the new lab, the company has appointed one of its veteran researchers, Jennifer Tour Chayes. Dr. Chayes, 51, who has a doctorate in mathematical physics, said, ‘We believe that in the long run, putting money into basic research will pay off, but you have to wait longer for it.’

“Microsoft, beset by competitive pressures from companies like Google, sees first-rate research labs as more important than ever. The company, which made a $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo last week as one way to compete with Google, wants a set of labs in place that can develop business opportunities that will pay off well into the future.

“‘Essentially every other industrial lab I know is shrinking, with the exception of Google,’ Dr. Chayes said. Since she joined the company in 1997, she said, Microsoft Research has grown eightfold to 800 researchers who hold doctorates.

“Those research scientists are far outnumbered by the thousands of Microsoft engineers working in advanced development and direct product development.

“‘The outcome of basic research is insights, and what development people do is take those insights and create products with them,’ Dr. Chayes said. ‘The two things are very different.’

“Microsoft is adamant about retaining a pure research department reminiscent of the old Bell Laboratories, whose scientists were awarded six Nobel Prizes over the years.

“‘Microsoft is probably the sole remaining corporate research lab that still values basic research,’ said Maria Klawe, a mathematician who is president of Harvey Mudd College.”

(“Microsoft Adds Research Lab in East as Others Cut Back.” Katie Hafner. The New York Times. February 4, 2008. pg 3)

CREATION is an outcome of the dynamic tensions of apparent opposites: thinking and doing, basics and advances, short-term and long-term, shrinking and growing, free-rein and structure, formulas and insights -- on and on and on...