[HN Gopher] The Four Kinds of Research-and-Development Teams
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The Four Kinds of Research-and-Development Teams
Author : zdw
Score : 58 points
Date : 2024-06-13 04:58 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blogs.newardassociates.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blogs.newardassociates.com)
| contingencies wrote:
| Not really sold on this take. It seems pretty bigco-focused and a
| bit weak and arbitrary.
|
| You could equally divide R&D teams in many other ways, eg.
| academic vs. startup vs. bigco, shipping vs. pre-market, targeted
| vs. wandering, focused vs. scattergun, single domain vs. cross-
| domain, business focused vs. possibility focused, full time vs.
| part time, dedicated space and facility vs. shared with
| production, etc.
| dswalter wrote:
| Please write the post where you analyze R&D through these
| different lenses! I would love to hear more of your thoughts.
| ghaff wrote:
| In general, unless it's very pre-market and
| exploratory/academic, research _and_ development almost implies
| BigCo--and it tends to tilt towards development over time. The
| obvious exceptions are both pretty rare and last about as long
| as the company has a bunch of extra money to toss around.
| codingdave wrote:
| Seems fairly lightweight to me as well, but I think that is the
| point - this is a teaser for content the author intends to
| expand upon in later posts. So as just an intro, it seems fine.
| I do hope if they continue to write up this content, they focus
| more on why this categorization matters and what benefit it
| offers an organization to conceptualize their teams in one of
| these ways.
| a1o wrote:
| This doesn't look like the R&D I see in actual research centers -
| like places where you can play with particle accelerators, big
| pools, wind tunnels, microscopes.
| constantcrying wrote:
| But those don't do R&D. They just do the R and never intend to
| bring a product to market.
|
| E.g. automotive companies operate wind tunnels as well. Those
| would be used by teams evaluating car designs, together with
| simulation teams.
| constantcrying wrote:
| This seems very software focused and in my experience doesn't
| really apply to e.g. an engineering company.
|
| Completely missing is e.g. simulation or in general evaluation of
| designs. In my experience teams also do multiple tasks, e.g. when
| you are doing simulations you also have to look at how the
| simulation can be improved or whether repetitive simulation tasks
| can be automated. Nobody besides your team could do do this
| research on new methods, simply because nobody else really
| understands your tasks and activities.
| slowking2 wrote:
| Agreed. I work in medical device engineering, and >50% of our
| time relates to simulation in some way. A big part of our
| responsibilities is designing, implementing, or reimplementing
| models of various subsystems relevant to our devices so we can
| do preliminary estimates of safety or efficacy. Analyzing real
| world outcomes is also important, although I haven't been at
| the company long enough yet for that to catch up with
| simulation in terms of how much time we spend on it.
|
| I'd say the closest description to us in the article is the
| practical research team. We have fairly clear business goals we
| are fulfilling with our work.
| djha-skin wrote:
| This article reminds me of The Art of War, wherein Sun Tzu often
| classifies different war-adjacent concepts in terms of the number
| 5 - - 5 types of terrain, 5 types of spies, etc. As you read you
| can tell there are obviously more than five types of something.
| Yet the classifications are not without use. They serve to focus
| the reader on perhaps the "top 5" things, and serve to keep the
| text short while also still useful.
|
| Surely there are more types of corporate research teams than
| four, but I still find the formulation instructive. I can see why
| these types of research activities deserve treatment and
| discussion. Further, the article made its point neatly in just a
| few paragraphs.
| blobbers wrote:
| Can someone please explain to me how this is not an https page in
| 2024?
|
| The http://www.newardassociates.com/bio.html has enough
| information about this person that I really don't think their
| explanation of R&D makes sense.
| ralferoo wrote:
| To be fair, in those pictures at the bottom he does actually
| look a lot like The Dude. I was thinking it was all bluster
| until I scrolled down and saw them!
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| I felt like this take was pretty spot on, and I think a lot of
| dissatisfaction can arise when folks feel like they are on the
| research team, but are actually on the spy team.
| Scene_Cast2 wrote:
| I worked in an R&D team at a bigco. My team didn't cleanly fit in
| any of these archetypes. Our goal was to do the same thing as the
| core ML team, but with higher tolerance for risk (2x the timeline
| allowance on new ideas before calling it quits for example) and
| with a higher bar for success (small launches that would be okay
| for the core team were not big enough for us). We had pretty free
| reign over the approaches - whether that's looking at academic or
| industry breakthroughs, porting existing internal breakthroughs
| to other areas, or new innovation.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| I once worked for a company where their R&D team just acted as a
| middleman between the company and research organizations like
| universities and national labs. It worked well as the
| universities and national labs have funding for out-there stuff,
| but lack actual data and often a true understanding for how
| things work in industry. A lot of the companies in industry often
| don't have the resources (or priority) to do their own research,
| so sometimes both camps benefit.
|
| You could probably add like 10 more categories to this if you
| include actual traditional engineering companies (e.g. mechanical
| engineering). I do a lot of simulations myself with real models
| and haven't done any super theoretical journal work yet.
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