R&D Strategy

Research and development (R&D) has come to play a key role in public and private sector organizations – but it raises strategic challenges around resource allocation for innovation against a background of uncertainty. During the twentieth century, a number of models emerged for enabling R&D strategy but in a climate of increasing knowledge availability and its global distribution new approaches are being developed around the theme of “open innovation”. Taking advantage of major shifts in networking technologies, emphasis is moving from R&D strategy as being concerned with knowledge creation and deployment and toward managing knowledge flows into and out from the organization. While this offers significant opportunities moving to open innovation and raises challenges for R&D strategy, especially in areas of skills, intellectual property management, and absorptive capacity to identify, acquire, and assimilate external knowledge. Keywords: RD technology; innovation; strategy; open innovation; intellectual property