The Customer for R&D Is Always Wrong!

Abstract

Effective RD neither is likely to get much good harvest for very long. Applications RD it was much older (1) What he meant, of course, was that knowledge is a cumulative, slowly developing thing; others before us have been tall and seen much, and therefore we can see even farther. If you want to do new things, then you had better know about the old things, and you had better know a broad collection of what is known: what the giants discovered. We stand upon the shoulders of Newton and Gibbs, Bohr and Einstein, Brunel and Steinmetz, the Wright brothers and Watt, and others more recent. Francis Bacon, even earlier, wrote, Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed (2). This was a profound statement--if you want to develop a technology, if you want to use knowledge, you had better understand how the universe works or you may be trying to create something that cannot be done. Any R&D fad that tries to destroy the connectedness and the deep roots of knowledge that lead to technological capability is going to put the business in trouble. It is the structure of knowledge and the structure of the background of technological creations that forces some of the organizational aspects of R&D. We ignore this at our peril. Think, for a moment, of the kinds of knowledge that we use and take for granted, and the connections of knowledge that are necessary to solve any real industrial or commercial problem. …

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