From R&D Management to Management of Innovation. Research on the Organizational Factor, Trends, Mainstream and Hidden Treasures

Answering the question ‘Management of innovation: are we looking at the right things?’ is an important but difficult task. The ‘we’ in the phrase ‘are we looking at the right things?’ is at minimum twofold in this chapter: the community of practitioners in innovation management, and the innovation researcher community. The ‘things’ I look at in this chapter are the organizational aspects of research and development (R&D) management. One short conceptual remark is relevant here to understand the purpose of my contribution. I consider R&D management as part of the management of innovation, with the distinction that commercialization and implementation issues are in general more important in innovation management than in R&D management. Yet, the main trends in R&D management show that the importance of commercialization and implementation issues has grown considerably over time, which justifies my contention that R&D and innovation management have become synonyms. Or, to put it differently, the evolution of thinking and conceptualization of R&D management over time has made R&D management a misnomer because it has been integrated in the innovation function.