Research and Development

To remain competitive products have to evolve and improve. This doesn't happen on its own - money needs to spent on Research and Development to ensure it. One of the problems with R&D is that there is often a very long payback period for the money. The money has to be spent at the earliest stage of the product life cycle, but the product often takes a long time to develop. Once developed the market then often takes time to grow. The return from the money spent on R&D can often be a long time coming.

This is particularly true with aerospace industries, including ballooning. This is because technical developments take a long time and the products are often highly complex requiring several developments to take place before the full product can be developed.

Large R&D departments will be common in businesses that are concerned with new technology, or which are in highly competitive markets. In both cases, it will be important for the business to try to stay ahead of competitors with new or improved product lines. Even in the smallest business, however, there will usually be some research and development going on - businesses trying out new lines or products, or developing different services or varieties of existing services.

Outside the department

Much research and development is of such a technical or scientific nature that it actually takes place away from business. This may be in specialist research institutions or universities.

Jobs

Jobs in research and development include designers (draughtsmen and women and technical drawing experts), engineers who can build models and prototypes, mechanics, technologists and IT and computer specialists.

Research

The first distinct area of the department is research. This may be either market research or product research. The marketing area will usually carry out market research, but researchers will need to work closely with R&D and production. Product research will be carried out by R&D. Researchers will be looking at what products can be developed, or what improvements can be made to existing products.

Testing

New products will have to be tested at all stages of development. This used to mean a very expensive process of building models and then testing them. Some of this testing may now be done much more efficiently using IT. Computer programs can show how a design would look and simulate some of the forces that might affect the design. This cuts out a lot of the time and expense in the initial stages of development.