I think most of the changes to corporate R&D in the past 30 years closely reflect the shift in focus toward short term profits, thereby reducing stockholder wil

I think most of the changes to corporate R&D in the past 30 years closely reflect the shift in focus toward short term profits, thereby reducing stockholder will to invest in high risk new new things like quantum computing or single cell genomics. At the same time, the cultural rise of tech startups has encouraged corporate R&D heads to farm out much of their interest in cutting edge tech to underwrite those startups from afar. By investing in startups from funds separate from mainstream R&D, it's easier to lay blame for failures outside the internal R&D organization. I've worked in big pharma R&D for 15 years and gov't/military R&D for 20 years before that. Increasingly I see the forms of R&D diversifying and extending outside the org's primary lab, just as 100% of DARPA projects are fielded external to the DoD labs. As external R&D investments and partnerships rise, it's little wonder that primary R&D labs shrink and their focus shifts to better serve short term RoI like improving / debugging internal processes and inefficiencies.