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The advent of high-technology industries around the turn of the century created the modern industrial research department and placed a new emphasis upon the search for patentable innovations. While some of this research led to advances in basic scientific knowledge, and much of it produced product or process improvements that were directly applicable to a firm's business, a great deal was undertaken to enhance firms' bargaining powers with each other in order to preserve monopoly positions. In the early years of radio, the structure of the industry changed repeatedly with every innovation in apparatus or circuitry, a situation that led, as Professor Reich shows, to heavy investment in “non-productive” research.
Leonard S. Reich (Sat,) studied this question.