[pstuart]

Or maybe just have your R&D teams focused on doing R&D with zero corporate interference. Staff it with personal assistants whose only job is to ensure the researchers have whatever they need and are never bothered with meetings or other corporate shenanigans. The assistants could then be the proxies to management to provide feedback to management, but only on best effort and still staying the fuck out of the way of the researchers.

Easy peasy!

[eikenberry]

Easy peasy yet still impossible for them to do as R&D doesn't add to the bottom line, it is a cost center.

[pstuart]

Easey peasy was said with a wink, although technically speaking it would be easy -- if they didn't have their heads up their ass.

A dear friend of mine was doing R&D at a startup where management poured on a bunch of low-level management work that took him away from his joy, which was developing new tools and approaches to solving customer problems. He left, and went to another gig that promised him complete freedom to invent and discover. That job is at a Fortune 500 company that is slowly starting to pull its head out of its ass.