[mmooss]

Great point. I think that also emphasizes the necessity of the D in R&D: The research has to be adapted to the real world to be useful, for example to organizational frameworks and processes that manage complexity as you say.

Most software organizations I know don't have anything like the time to do D (to distinguish it from software development), except in a few clear high-ROI cases. Big software companies like Microsoft and Google have research divisions; I wonder how much they devote to D as opposed to R, and how much of that is released publicly.