Retooling Research & Development
for a New Era

Amidst stressful and unpredictable business and societal conditions related to the on-going COVID-19 pandemic, R&D organizations are feeling new pressures. They are trying to fill gaps on their team in a tight talent market; solve problems with essential company operations while also building for the future; bring on new vendors when existing ones are unable to deliver; and deliver more output with the same resources — or in some cases, less. While R&D teams may have figured out a hybrid work model, many still report feeling isolated from their customers or end users.

To shed light on these dynamics, and understand how Global 1000 companies can productively address them, we fielded a survey of R&D professionals in Q4 2021 and also conducted a series of qualitative interviews. We received 78 qualified survey responses; 79 percent of our survey respondents were at the director level or above in their organizations. Sixty-seven percent of respondents were based in North America, and just over one-quarter in Europe. We also conducted qualitative interviews with senior R&D execs at Campbell's Soup, W.L. Gore, Comcast, 3M, Kimberly-Clark, and a handful of other large companies.

This research project was produced by InnoLead and sponsored by Wazoku.