Technology organisations and corporate R&D. Recent developments

Often, corporate R&D has been confined to a limited role in the strategic planning and R&D strategy processes. Work in the strategic management field has shown that a major source of sustainable competitive advantage is a firm's unique competencies, i.e. a set of firm-specific knowledge, skills, technologies and capabilities, that are able to lead to generate a series of profitable innovations. Competencies are corporate resources (Hamel and Prahalad, 1990). It is argued that in competence based competition, corporate R&D plays a central role in competence building, refreshing and cultivating and to the implementation of an R&D strategy that is consistant with strategic thrusts. A new technology organisation is required. This work identifies three main tasks of the new mission of corporate R&D: building new competencies, nurturing the knowledge base of nascent business, and identifying potential applications of existing competencies.<>