In the next ten years we will witness an explosion in R&D forms. This will be a period of large-scale experimentation in which many R&D forms will co-exist, often under one corporate umbrella. Today, the world of R&D is experiencing the equivalent of the prehistoric Cambrian Explosion when the earth saw a huge number of new life forms appear and spread over the planet. In approximately the last 100 years, a combination of forces, from government policy to scientific culture, have re-shaped the landscape of R&D. From early domination by individual inventors at the end of 19th century, R&D has moved into large-scale corporate and government R&D labs, and in the last ten years increasingly outside of internal organizational boundaries into innovation networks, bringing together internal and external resources to solve problems or pursue common passions.
