I left a tenured position after getting fed up with several things, among which the same grant proposal getting a “it’s too visionary” from a reviewer and “it’s trivial” from another. If it’s such a coin toss, F off will ya?
Each person, "principal investigator", has a lab which they built.
They only have so much space, and so much budget, but they get a clean slate.
And they're all different. But they all have brilliant ideas they need to work out.
Advantages of doing it like this were proven earlier, and it was still going strong like this in the 1970's.
It was still kind of an academic model.
In these decades there was sometimes special schooling where students were groomed to take their place in this exact lab, starting as pre-teens. Nobody imagined it would ever dwindle in any way.
This is what places like Exxon and DuPont still looked like in 1979 too.
Without being quite an actual monopoly, one thing that's in common is that anything you invent that could be the least bit useful to an employer that size, they can surely afford to make the most of it like few others can.
So the scientists could go wild to a certain extent as long as they were guided by the same "north star" that the org as a whole recognized. Whether it feels like you're getting closer or not, that's the direction you must be drawn to.
You should have seen some of the stuff they built.
Oil companies can have an amazing budget sometimes.
When somebody had a breakthrough, or OTOH scuttled a project or transferred to a different technical center, their lab would be cleared out so a completely different project could get underway with a new investigator building from the ground up. This could take a while, but eventually some very well-equipped labs having outstanding capabilities can develop.
As an entrepreneur, I liked it down in the basement where they would auction off the used gear from about a dozen of those labs at once, after it had sat in storage for a period of time.
After critical mass was achieved, then I had way more fairly current equipment at my immediate disposal than any dozen of my institutional counterparts could benefit from the mainstream way. Turns out I really could get more accomplished and make more progress my own way than if I was actually at a well-funded institution instead. Using equipment they once owned and were successful with to a certain extent, and I usually became only a little bit more advanced, and only some of the time.
Most things are truly the "least bit useful" anyway ;)
