Development of the US Innovation Ecosystem By facebooker_1637030683384265 1824 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the first US technological research university, established 1876 First R&D lab started in Menlo Park by Thomas Edison 1887 National Institutes of Health founded 1913 First moving assembly line created by Henry Ford for mass production of automobiles 1925 Bell Laboratories founded as a subsidiary of AT&T 1931 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the first US National Laboratory, founded 1942 Applied Physics Laboratory, the oldest UARC and first laboratory devoted to advanced technologies for World War II, established 1945 Science, the Endless Frontier written by Vannevar Bush 1946 The first modern VC firm, American Research and Development Corporation, established by MIT president Karl Compton 1947 RAND Corporation, the first FFRDC, established 1950 National Science Foundation established 1957 Fairchild Semiconductor, the first venture-backed startup, founded 1958 DARPA founded 1959 Limited partnerships, the structure used by venture capital firms today, first emerged with Draper, Gaither, & Anderson (DGA) 1969 ARPANET, the first public packet switched computer network, established 1983 The "birthday" of the internet - Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) adopted by ARPANET 1992 Army Research Laboratory established 2005 YCombinator, the first seed accelerator, started 2019 "Focused Research Organization" concept proposed by Sam Rodriques