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TL;DR
- In 300+ sessions with R&D teams, GetFocus heard the same twelve questions. None were about how a technology works. All were about which bet to back, stop or time.
- Underneath almost every one is the same missing number: how fast each competing technology improves.
- Leaders get roughly 3% of their time for these calls. The method has to fit that.
300+ R&D conversations · 2025–2026
The questions R&D leaders ask
Betting
Are we putting the money in the right places?
Stopping
Do we continue or do we stop?
Seeing
Am I missing another option that will bite me later?
Seeing
What are my competitors doing, and are we already too late?
Timing
Should we invest now or wait?
Selling
How do I explain this to a board that doesn't speak technology?
Trusting
My experts say it will never work. What do I do with that?
Betting
How do I compare an early option with one I can buy today?
Source: GetFocus review of 300+ working sessions with R&D teams
What is an R&D strategy?
An R&D strategy is the set of decisions about which technical bets to fund, which to stop, and when to move. It sits between the business strategy, which says where the company competes, and the project portfolio, which says what the teams work on this year.
That sounds like a planning exercise. In practice it is a forecasting exercise. Every R&D strategy is a bet that some technologies will be better, cheaper or faster in five years than the ones you rely on today. The leaders we work with know that. What they lack is a way to measure it.
The twelve questions R&D leaders ask
Between September 2025 and October 2026 GetFocus reviewed more than 300 working sessions with heads of R&D, CTOs, innovation managers and technology scouts in chemicals, food and drink, consumer goods, automotive, industrial equipment, energy, aerospace and defence. We kept the questions in their own words.
| # | The question, in their words | What it really decides | Answer |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | "Are we putting the money in the right places?" | Which good projects get funded | How to prioritize R&D projects |
| 2 | "Do we continue or do we stop?" | Which projects end | Stage-gate and stopping |
| 3 | "Am I missing another option that will bite me later?" | Blind spots | Technology scouting process |
| 4 | "What are my competitors doing, and are we already too late?" | Competitive position | Competitive intelligence for R&D |
| 5 | "Should we invest now or wait?" | Timing | Invest now or wait |
| 6 | "How do I explain this to a board that doesn't speak technology?" | Selling the bet upward | Presenting R&D to the board |
| 7 | "My experts say it will never work. What do I do with that?" | Expert bias | When experts say no |
| 8 | "How do I compare an early option with one I can buy today?" | Maturity vs rate | TRL tells you how ready, not how fast |
| 9 | "Where do I even start in a field we don't know?" | Framing the question | Technology scouting process |
| 10 | "Will I get a clear decision, or just things to ponder?" | Turning signals into a call | How to prioritize R&D projects |
| 11 | "Can I trust this, and has it ever been wrong?" | Evidence | The backtest library |
| 12 | "How do I make time for tomorrow when today eats my agenda?" | Bandwidth | Below |
Why do all twelve come back to one number?
Read the list again and almost every question is about change over time. Will this option still be competitive when we launch? Is the competitor's route getting better faster than ours? Will waiting make it cheaper or more expensive?
Most R&D tools answer a different question: where does each technology stand today? Maturity scales, market reports, patent counts and expert panels all describe a position. None of them measures speed.
That speed is measurable. MIT spent six years building real cost-and-performance histories for 28 technology domains and found that every technology improves exponentially, each at its own stable rate. GetFocus estimates that rate, the Technology Improvement Rate (TIR), from the patent citation network, validated on 150+ domains. Where two technologies do the same job, the faster improver has historically won. The seven backtests show the rate calling the winner years before the market did.
Christophe Perthuisot, former SVP of R&D at Moët Hennessy and Danone, described what was missing in his own career: "We had no easy way to know how quickly these technologies would progress." (Read his story.)
The constraint behind every question: time
Leaders get roughly 3% of their time for the bets that decide the next five years. The other 97% goes to today's problems. Christophe put it plainly: "What you really want to spend your time on is building tomorrow and the day after."
So any answer to the twelve questions has to be fast. A six-month consulting study arrives after the decision. A trend dashboard adds reading without adding a verdict. The leaders who felt in control had one thing in common: a standing view of which technologies in their space were improving fastest, refreshed without their involvement, so the 3% went on deciding, not on gathering.
What the twelve questions have in common
- They are decisions, not research topics. "Where do we double down, and where do we not?" is a different question from "what is happening in this field?"
- They are about trajectories. A decision taken from a snapshot ages badly. A rate tells you where each option will be when the decision matures.
- They are made alone. Christophe called long-term technology choice "a very high-stakes, solitary game."
- They have to be defended upward, to a boss who usually comes from finance or marketing. One number per option, compared over time, survives that conversation.
FAQ
What is an R&D strategy?
An R&D strategy is the set of choices about which technical directions to fund, at what level, which to stop, and when to move. It links the business strategy to the project portfolio.
What are the biggest challenges R&D leaders face?
In GetFocus's review of 300+ sessions with R&D teams, the most frequent were choosing between good projects with limited budget, stopping projects that no longer fit, avoiding blind spots, timing a move before competitors, trusting evidence over opinion, and explaining a bet to non-technical executives.
How do you measure whether an R&D bet is right?
Compare how fast each competing technology improves, not only how mature it is today. The Technology Improvement Rate, estimated from patent citations, has called the winner in every GetFocus backtest, including HDD vs SSD and incandescent vs LED.
How often should an R&D strategy be reviewed?
Most teams review the portfolio once or twice a year. The rates behind it should be watched continuously, so a change between reviews triggers a decision instead of waiting for the next cycle.
