(FORTUNE Magazine) – I was really sorry to see that Paul Allen closed his Interval Research lab in Palo Alto. Paul is a nice guy who continues to do interesting things--it is amazing what you can do when you have $20 billion or so. But my sorrow has little to do with Paul and more to do with a creeping pessimism about our economic future. Put simply, without research the new economy is flying blind.

Thanks to the Internet and the World Wide Web, our economic systems are becoming efficient and almost friction-free. So much so, in fact, that there is no room left for some of the old inefficiencies--even the valuable inefficiencies. Like research.

That's a big worry. Much of the technology underlying our efficient economy was developed under conditions that did not demand an immediate return on investment. The microprocessor was developed at AT&T Bell Labs. Many of the elements of the networked personal computer--the local area network, graphical user interface, laser printer, graphical word processor, and so on--were developed at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). The mouse was developed at Stanford Research International (SRI), a private but mostly government-funded research unit in Menlo Park, Calif. The Internet Protocol was originally developed at DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). The main protocol for the World Wide Web was developed by a British programmer at a Swiss research lab. There are plenty of other examples of noncommercial research that drove big commercial changes.

The key word is research. The product development unit in most companies is known as research and development (R&D). But companies are mostly focused on the "D" part, looking to convert ideas into products--usually ones where the technology and the opportunity are pretty well understood. The "R" part is different. It involves behavior like sitting around, sucking on your fingers, and conjuring crazy ideas that everyone thinks will never work. Not surprisingly, as every company tries to become more efficient, the "R" in R&D has come to matter less and less.

AT&T doesn't own Bell Labs anymore (it's now part of Lucent). Instead, AT&T tries to buy entire industries, like the cable television business. SRI still operates; one project it's running now would create a functional wireless network for home appliances, with a kind of GPS system that could track the humans in the house. But SRI is under pressure to develop commercially interesting technologies that its parent can license or spin out into viable companies. Xerox isn't spending much time on computing these days, other than on elements that fit into copiers and document storage systems. The Department of Defense is defending itself against budget cuts, since we aren't at war with anyone.

So here's the big question: How do we do research now? Corporations are under too much pressure to host major research labs. The government is paying off our massive debt, cutting virtually every part of the Great Society and the welfare state. Many of our great researchers and academics are distracted as they found new, venture-backed firms or become engineering chiefs at nascent dot-coms. Everyone's so busy being efficient and profit-minded that I wonder where we'll get those stupid, outlandish ideas that will drive growth beyond the Internet.

That's why it's a shame Interval is closing. When Paul Allen put up $100 million in 1992 and attracted former Xerox exec David Liddle to run Interval, the answer to my big question seemed clear: rich people. Rich people could replace inefficient governments and beneficent corporations. Rich people with an extra billion or two might happily blow a few hundred million to create a sweet environment where supergeeks and other smarties could suck on their fingers and think of great ideas. (For more, see the Paul Allen story on page 249.)

Paul Allen was one of the best prospects for doing just that. The co-founder of Microsoft is crazy enough to buy basketball teams, build a Jimi Hendrix museum, and finance some fairly obscure businesses. A geek himself, he appreciates how geeks work and generate new ideas. And he has demonstrated a willingness to let his companies run unprofitably for a long time if they are pursuing an idea that he thinks is important. Perfect.

And now he has shut down Interval Research. Does this mean rich people aren't the solution? Did Paul mismanage the lab? Choose the wrong people to run it? Give it the wrong mission? It's not as if he needed to make a profit from it; he has more money now than he did eight years ago (mostly from the increase in Microsoft's stock price and several very good investments).

No, I still have faith in the basic model. This is just one of those isolated things that don't work out. Paul Allen may have been the wrong multibillionaire geek to finance pure research. Now, I say, it's up to the other prospects: Yahoo's Jerry Yang, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, eBay's Pierre Omidyar. Come on, guys--it's time for you to do your part in making the new economy work!

STEWART ALSOP is a partner with New Enterprise Associates, a venture capital firm. Except as noted, neither he nor his partnership has a financial interest in the companies mentioned. He can be reached at alsop_infotech@fortunemail.com. His column can be bookmarked online at www.fortune.com/technology/alsop/.