The changing organisation of R&D

In a briefing on corporate R&D the Economist of March 3rd 2007 outlines the changes of corporate R&D since Vannevar Bush's "Science: The endless frontier" (1945).

The thesis of the contribution is: Whereas Bush suggested the separation of "R" from "D" , the key idea for organizing "R&D" is to integrate the two as closely as possible and, perhaps link them with marketing and consultancy servcies too.

Some key sentences from the paper:

"The approach to R&D is changing because long-term research was a luxury only a monopoly could afford."
"The research and development that Bush tore assunder are once again becoming entwined. Old-fashioned R&D is losing its ampersand"
"Only a few years agao researchers were judged on the basis of patents and papers but today they roll up their shirt-sleeves and work alongside the company's consultants.."
"the old model or research of 'putting people in a bubble', is over, he [Bernardo Huberman of HP] says. The most interesting research is now done 'where technology touches people' ".
"Everything we do is aimed at avoiding a 'handoff' - there is no 'technology transfer'. It is a bad phrase at IBM." (says Paul Horn research director at IBM)
Google "employs very small teams to work on a small number of ideas, some of which may turn into big hits. Failure is an essential part of the process. 'The way you say this is: 'Please fail quickly - so you can try again.' " [Eric Schmidt of Google]
"The new model of R&D turns researchers into the shock-troops of innovation."
"And now I realise that there is at least as much creativity in finding ways to take the idea to market as coming up with the idea in the first place. I would have spent my time differently had I figured this out early on." [J.S. Brown, former director of Xerox PARC].

RAEM