R&D—Reactive and Passive Partner to Responsive Collaborator

Organizational changes are perceived as reactionary and revolutionary responses to overcome the challenges faced during developmental phases of an organization. In the present chapter, we look at how different phases of R &D generations have encountered a wide range of technological, organizational, and structural challenges. The next section of this chapter accentuates the role of understanding context, structure, and process in R&D organizations. Contextual factors are ownership, location, pace of technology change, and organizational environment. Structural factors are formalized and standardized representations of hierarchy, authority, delegation, and coordination. Finally, the process emphasizes the end actions of organization through transformational leadership, goal setting, and timely decisions. We conclude this chapter with the new emerging dimension and future of R& D organizations of being ambidextrous. Ambidextrous organizations are an agenda to understand its own capability to keep their vision, goal, and strategies at par with market needs and technology development. Learning Objectives: To explore the movement of R&D from being a reactive to a responsive partner in the organization; to understand the context, structure, and process of the R&D organization or R&D functioning; to analyze the evolution of five generations of R&D; to explore the challenges encountered in the changing face of R&D and the future in the context of ambidextrous organizations.