Basic research is at the heart of many of the companies in Silicon Valley that are driving the value in publishing today. When the revenue and margin leaders in electronic publishing are plunking down 10 percent of their budgets on R&D it's hard to imagine how traditional publishers and aggregators are going to wheel and deal their way to a superior position against these competitors any time soon. When robust R&D is at the heart of your company's culture, innovations that surface as highly profitable products just seem to follow naturally. It takes more than R&D types to understand today's publishing environment, but if you're not attracting the best and the brightest of them you've got to wonder what tomorrow will bring to your bottom line.

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