THE USE OF R&D by Peter F. Drucker

“You are looking for business, not for products. If I look at P&G, you are in five different businesses, aren’t you? They share distribution channels, though they overlap. I think that a company like yours needs your kind of outfit for the simple reason that it is not R&D. You need the R&D capacity as one of your inputs, especially when it comes to capitalizing on success—there you need it very badly, because that in most cases, involves redesigning something and your R&D people will not look outside of P&G.

Almost none of the things that have now come out of Bell Labs, have found major use in telephony, and on the other hand, only the things that are fundamental breakthroughs in telephony have not come out of Bell Labs. Glass fiber, you know—cables, or portable telephones or what have you. And that is true of all industries—technology is crisscross now.”