Questions
R&D questions before you name a lab.
What a research and development team is, how small companies staff it, and when it is just the backlog in a nicer shirt.
- What is research and development (R&D)?
- Creative, systematic work on a real unknown — then a change people keep using. A lab, a patent, or a backlog in a nicer shirt is not R&D until the outcome is still uncertain and what you learn can be used again.
- What is an R&D team?
- A research and development team that attacks a real unknown in a job, then leaves a change people keep using. Research finds why the work hurts. Development puts the change where the work already happens. A lab that never leaves the room has not innovated yet.
- What is the difference between R&D and product development?
- R&D is the stretch where you still do not know if it can work, or how. Product development is the longer road once that unknown is gone. After Friday is unsurprising, you need builders — not a research label on the backlog.
- How do you build an R&D team in a small company?
- Do not hire a chief of innovation first. Name one job and the unknown. Write the kill rule. Put two or three people next to the work: the operator, a builder who can stop, someone who can say no. One bet in use or dead before you open a second.
- When does a company need research and development?
- When the same job keeps costing hours, the workaround has become normal, and you cannot honestly say you already know the fix. If a competent team could specify the work on Monday and be unsurprised by Friday, hire engineers. Do not call it R&D.
- How do you measure R&D and innovation?
- For each live bet: the job in one line, the unknown, the evidence that continues the work, the evidence that stops it. Then ask on a later Friday whether people kept the new way. Hours returned and adoption count. Patents and workshops do not.
- What is the difference between an R&D team and an innovation team?
- R&D resolves an unknown. Innovation is the change once someone uses it. An “innovation team” can be a title with no unknown and no user. An R&D team that never ships has not innovated. You need both halves, on the same job.
- How do you de-risk R&D?
- Write the unknown and the expensive ways to be wrong. Run a patent search and a thin test before you fund a prototype. Write a kill rule. Monitor new filings while the bet is live. Hire a patent attorney when money, a product name, or a country sale is on the table.
- How do you use patent search to de-risk R&D?
- Write the mechanism in plain words, search public databases with synonyms and class codes, read claims, and write a one-page note before you fund the prototype. A hit is a reason to reshape or stop. It is not a clearance letter.
- How do you use patent monitoring to de-risk R&D?
- Save the first-pass search. Watch new publications and grants for that job, monthly. Score hits as ignore, adjacent, blocking, or needs a lawyer. Act the same week as a blocking hit. Stop the watch when the bet is dead or the design is known.
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