I worked in an R&D team at a bigco. My team didn't cleanly fit in any of these archetypes. Our goal was to do the same thing as the core ML team, but with highe

I worked in an R&D team at a bigco. My team didn't cleanly fit in any of these archetypes. Our goal was to do the same thing as the core ML team, but with higher tolerance for risk (2x the timeline allowance on new ideas before calling it quits for example) and with a higher bar for success (small launches that would be okay for the core team were not big enough for us). We had pretty free reign over the approaches - whether that's looking at academic or industry breakthroughs, porting existing internal breakthroughs to other areas, or new innovation.