How Innovation Really Works: Using the Trillion-Dollar R&D Fix to Drive Growth

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MISCONCEPTION 6: R&D Needs to Be More Relevant

Another major trend in R&D over the past few decades has been tighter coupling with marketing—making R&D more commercially relevant. This has led to a shift in the locus of R&D from central corporate laboratories to operating divisions’ laboratories, and from centralized decision-making to decentralized decision-making. Of all the prescriptions discussed so far, the need for more relevance is the one most widely viewed to be valid. In an informal survey of professionals attending RQ workshops, 80 percent of consultants and 90 percent of investment analysts and managers believe that having R&D decisions made by divisions (which are closer to the commercial markets) leads to higher RQ.

THE IMPETUS ...