When I've done R&D in an agile setting, usually the research was done outside of the scrum process, and once that was done then the development would be done in

When I've done R&D in an agile setting, usually the research was done outside of the scrum process, and once that was done then the development would be done in a standard scrum methodology. The reason you can't really apply "Agile" to research is that having a useful product at the end of each sprint is a central to Agile development but runs contrary to the purpose of research. Now, you still need to manage your research process. You need to identify the specific research questions you need to answer, and you need to bound the time investment. But let's not try too hard to shoehorn a methodology primarily oriented towards IT consulting into every other domain.