No, it's not about things moving fast. It's about projects carrying specific kinds of risk and developing a specific kind of output. Namely technical risk and

No, it's not about things moving fast. It's about projects carrying specific kinds of risk and developing a specific kind of output. Namely technical risk and intellectual property. Technical risk is the risk that your technical development won't pan out. I'm not referring to schedule risk - the risk that it will take longer than you thought - but actual risk that it will never work at all. Intellectual property is a durable, hard-to-copy advantage over your competition. Pharma is a great example because it is a very pure form of R&D - you find a drug, test the shit out of it, those tests mostly go negative, and if you succeed, you have a formula and a manufacturing method that lets you charge extortionate rates. Most software work is not like this at all. And no, ongoing future work is absolutely not guaranteed to be R&D. If anything, it is the opposite: most startups begin with R&D - creating an uncertain product with a (hopefully) durable advantage - and move out of doing R&D as they mature and the competition catches up. That is generally the lifecycle of companies that develop new product categories, from Singer (the first company to produce a sewing machine), to IBM, to Google.