Our research looked into the decline of R&D productivity in firms across the US over the past several decades. In particular, it involved collection and analysis of data on R&D funding and research laboratories from multiple online sources and databases. Throughout the project, we learned a lot about qualitative research and efficiently collecting and organizing large amounts of data from imperfect and unformatted sources. Overall, PURM was a very rewarding part of our summer, as we were able to contribute to an larger project that will provide a better understanding of R&D trends, which are a huge part of economic development.