Research in industry has been instrumental towards transferring academic and research achievements to society? In engineering sciences there are several fantastic labs that were built and supported from the major conglomerates, like for example the Xerox PARC, HP or Schlumberger Lab at Pallo Alto on eighties, the Siemens, NEC, Lucent, GE, IBM labs in nineties, the Microsoft, Google labs in the last decade and most recently the Facebook/Apple labs in the ongoing decade.
The recipy is not hat different despite almost 40 years of interval. Industry is doing quite well, cash flow is available, so the idea was and is to hire exceptional academic faculty with three fairly basic arguments: (i) salaries that cannot be met by academia, and (ii) research environment free from the time consuming and tedious process of "grant-hunting", (iii) interesting problems and access to data that cannot be found easily in the academic world.
Arguments are quite convincing (at least at the very beginning) conditions are amazing and things do work for certain time. However, industry has sort of cycles, in particular in the digital era things can change so fast!!! I recall when joining Siemens Corporate Research most of the funding used to come without conditions from the parent company (75%), while being there this percentage went to 50%, and the date I left the parent company funding dropped to 25% and discussions were ongoing on how to even further reduce to 10% and get the remaining 15% from government grants. Things might have changed now but that was the case then. Places like Xerox, HP, NEC disappeared and fantastic environments like Microsoft Research have considerably diminished their investment targeting few areas of computer science & engineering! (which was not the case at the time of their creation)
This is not seems to the case for places like Apple, Google or Facebook in now days, the cash flow is enormous, but it wasn't the case for Microsoft back in nineties? or for HP/Xerox back in eighties? Working in industry as an academic researcher is a great experience but has definitely an expiration day that one can hardly predict especially in engineering sciences where economic growth and wealth creation can happen and disappear so fast...
The conclusion, join as a freshman, a place that does well, keep in mind that this will not last, and therefore spend (max) 5 years working on interesting problems (it is such a great experience and definitely will have a tremendous impact in your academic career) while make all possible efforts to maintain a top level research portfolio and move towards a junior faculty position, or think in the long run, assume managerial responsibilities, build a sizable group and seek an academic position at the level of associate/full professor with tenure after 10-15 years.
Keep in mind that the situation will not last, salaries can be interesting but at some after some years you will be spending more and more time an management than real science. Of course, you can have a brilliant industrial career having a different impact on the society but this is not the view point/scope of this article targeting research perspectives in industry.
