That didnt stop the flow of Nobels

For work done after 1970 - optical tweezers,laser cooling, quantum hall, superres microscopy, quantum dots (NP 2023)

Not to forget Shor and Grover (1990s!)

Holmdel had the antenna of Penzias/Wilson

For me, this marked the end of Bell Labs (Murray Hill):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6n_scandal#Beginning_o...

Not sure what the bottleneck was: https://www.forbes.com/sites/josipamajic/2025/11/19/science-...

I guess you have to read a lot into what the OP means by the italicized "the." I read it as a question of the size and scale of working groups vis-a-vis the scale of the impact.

Ah right. The D in R&D, Deployment , was the thing that made Bell Labs special.

Universities diluted the later Nobel credit but it was org-magic at Bell (Labs) that got break-through tech out.