The Distance Between R&D and Revenue

Some R&D cycles take years because the technology is genuinely difficult. Others take years because the operating model around the technology makes them difficult.

In this article, I examine what happened when we stopped treating development speed as an R&D problem and instead looked at the entire path from customer need to commercial revenue. By changing how we validated assumptions, committed capital, coordinated across functions, and defined the outcome, we turned development cycles measured in years into months—at a fraction of the expected cost. The broader lesson: before adding resources to accelerate R&D, understand where the time, capital, and organizational friction are actually going.