"In the 1960s, IBM's chairman, Thomas Watson Sr., began the Fellows Program, in which he appointed Fellows (he called them his "wild ducks") for five years to be "dreamers, heretics, mavericks, gadflies, and geniuses." Their remit was simply to "shake up the system." The Fellows Program has been supremely successful. Only some 165 scientists were appointed, but five of these won Nobel Prizes. General Electric and Bell Laboratories ran similar programs. In 1980, as I have mentioned, BP launched Venture Research, arguably one of the most ambitious and imaginative exploratory research initiatives in industrial history, and supported it for 10 years."