Research and development (R&D), also known in Europe as research and technical (or technological) development (RTD), is a general term for activities related to the enterprise of corporate or governmental innovation.

The activities that are classified as R&D differ from company to company, but there are two primary models, with an R&D department being either staffed by engineers and tasked with directly developing new products, or staffed with industrial scientists and tasked with applied research in scientific or technological fields which may facilitate future product development.

In either case, R&D differs from the vast majority of corporate activities in that it is not often intended to yield immediate profit, and generally carries greater risk and an uncertain return on investment.

Open innovation is a term promoted by Henry Chesbrough, adjunct professor, and faculty director of the Center for Open Innovation at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, in a book of the same name, though the idea and discussion about some consequences (especially the interfirm cooperation in R&D) date as far back as the 1960s.

The concept is also related to user innovation, cumulative innovation, know-how trading, mass innovation, and distributed innovation. “Open innovation is a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as the firms look to advance their technology”.

Alternatively, it is “innovating with partners by sharing risk and sharing reward.” The boundaries between a firm and its environment have become more permeable; innovations can easily transfer inward and outward.

The central idea behind open innovation is that, in a world of widely distributed knowledge, companies cannot afford to rely entirely on their own research, but should instead buy or license processes or inventions (i.e. patents) from other companies.

In addition, internal inventions not being used in a firm’s business should be taken outside the company (e.g. through licensing, joint ventures, or spin-offs). The open innovation paradigm can be interpreted to go beyond just using external sources of innovation such as customers, rival companies, and academic institutions, and can be as much a change in the use, management, and employment of intellectual property as it is in the technical and research driven generation of intellectual property. In this sense, it is understood as the systematic encouragement and exploration of a wide range of internal and external sources for innovative opportunities, the integration of this exploration with firm capabilities and resources, and the exploitation of these opportunities through multiple channels.

Research comprises “creative work undertaken on a systematic basis in order to increase the stock of knowledge, including knowledge of humans, culture, and society, and the use of this stock of knowledge to devise new applications.” It is used to establish or confirm facts, reaffirm the results of previous work, solve new or existing problems, support theorems, or develop new theories.

A research project may also be an expansion of past work in the field. To test the validity of instruments, procedures, or experiments, research may replicate elements of prior projects or the project as a whole. The primary purposes of basic research (as opposed to applied research) are documentation, discovery, interpretation, or the research and development (R&D) of methods and systems for the advancement of human knowledge.

Approaches to research depend on epistemologies, which vary considerably both within and between humanities and sciences. There are several forms of research: scientific, humanities, artistic, economic, social, business, marketing, practitioner research, etc.

In natural sciences and social sciences, quantitative research is the systematic empirical investigation of observable phenomena via statistical, mathematical, or computational techniques. The objective of quantitative research is to develop and employ mathematical models, theories, and/or hypotheses pertaining to phenomena.

The process of measurement is central to quantitative research because it provides the fundamental connection between empirical observation and the mathematical expression of quantitative relationships. Quantitative data is any data that is in numerical form such as statistics, percentages, etc. In layman’s terms, this means that the quantitative researcher asks a specific, narrow question and collects a sample of numerical data from observable phenomena or from study participants to answer the question. The researcher analyzes the data with the help of statistics.

The researcher is hoping the numbers will yield an unbiased result that can be generalized to some larger population. Qualitative research, on the other hand, asks broad questions and collects word data from phenomena or participants. The researcher looks for themes and describes the information in themes and patterns exclusive to that set of participants. In social sciences, quantitative research is widely used in psychology, economics, sociology, marketing, community health, health & human development, gender, and political science, and less frequently in anthropology and history.

Research in mathematical sciences such as physics is also ‘quantitative’ by definition, though this use of the term differs in context. In the social sciences, the term relates to empirical methods, originating in both philosophical positivism and the history of statistics, which contrast with qualitative research methods.

Qualitative methods produce information only on the particular cases studied, and any more general conclusions are only hypotheses. Quantitative methods can be used to verify which of such hypotheses are true. A comprehensive analysis of 1274 articles published in the top two American sociology journals between 1935 and 2005 found that roughly two-thirds of these articles used quantitative methods.

Experience is the knowledge or mastery of an event or subject gained through involvement in or exposure to it. Terms in philosophy, such as “empirical knowledge” or “a posteriori knowledge,” are used to refer to knowledge based on experience.

A person with considerable experience in a specific field can gain a reputation as an expert. The concept of experience generally refers to know-how or procedural knowledge, rather than propositional knowledge: on-the-job training rather than book learning.

The interrogation of experience has a long tradition in continental philosophy. Experience plays an important role in the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard. The German term Erfahrung, often translated into English as “experience”, has a slightly different implication, connoting the coherency of life’s experiences.

Certain religious traditions (such as types of Buddhism, Surat Shabd Yoga, mysticism, and Pentecostalism) and educational paradigms with, for example, the conditioning of military recruit-training (also known as “boot camps”), stress the experiential nature of human epistemology.

This stands in contrast to alternatives: traditions of dogma, logic, or reasoning. Participants in activities such as tourism, extreme sports, and recreational drug use also tend to stress the importance of experience. The history of the word experience aligns it closely with the concept of experiment.

Return on investment (ROI) is the benefit to the investor resulting from an investment of some resource.

A high ROI means the investment gains compare favorably to investment cost.

As a performance measure, ROI is used to evaluate the efficiency of an investment or to compare the efficiency of a number of different investments. In purely economic terms, it is one way of considering profits in relation to capital invested.

Strategy (from Greek στρατηγία stratēgia, “art of troop leader; office of general, command, generalship”) is a high-level plan to achieve one or more goals under conditions of uncertainty.

In the sense of the “art of the general”, which included several subsets of skills including “tactics”, siegecraft, logistics, etc., the term came into use in the 6th century C.E. in East Roman terminology and was translated into Western vernacular languages only in the 18th century.

From then until the 20th century, the word “strategy” came to denote “a comprehensive way to try to pursue political ends, including the threat or actual use of force, in a dialectic of wills” in a military conflict, in which both adversaries interact.

Strategy is important because the resources available to achieve these goals are usually limited. Strategy generally involves setting goals, determining actions to achieve the goals, and mobilizing resources to execute the actions.

A strategy describes how the ends (goals) will be achieved by the means (resources). The senior leadership of an organization is generally tasked with determining strategy. Strategy can be intended or can emerge as a pattern of activity as the organization adapts to its environment or competes. It involves activities such as strategic planning and strategic thinking.

Henry Mintzberg from McGill University defined strategy as “a pattern in a stream of decisions” to contrast with a view of strategy as planning, while Max McKeown (2011) argues that “strategy is about shaping the future” and is the human attempt to get to “desirable ends with available means”. Dr. Vladimir Kvint defines strategy as “a system of finding, formulating, and developing a doctrine that will ensure long-term success if followed faithfully.”