Rustum Roy Lecture 2018 Abstract

Imagination and Innovation in the Land of Machines

David L. Morse, Corning Incorporated, USA

Industrial research has endured, waxed and waned, for well over 130 years. We examine some of the historically-recognized, leading R&D laboratories and the inventions they made and commercialized, as compared to today. The criticality of concurrent invention of processes to manufacture newly invented materials is described. How has industrial research changed and evolved, and what do we at Corning see as the future of materials R, D and E?  Will the next inventions be defined by more data, new algorithms and ever advancing computing power–the machines–or by knowledge and creativity? The students being educated today still need to be experimentalists, grounded in fundamentals, and enhanced by the emerging data analytics tools, because it will take both.