There's a growing market for independent R&D

The trend within large companies to farm out "non core" functions made sense when it was things like cleaning the office or feeding the staff, but it might seem like a step too far for something as crucial as the future of an organisation's technology. This misses the point that the world of R&D has changed.

Innovation happens a lot more quickly now, and few companies maintain R&D enterprises that can cover anything and everything. They certainly don't do the sort of blue skies stuff that went on before the boom in outsourcing in the 1980s.

So it is no surprise that R&D Magazine finds an air of optimism among the CEOs of the companies that provide independent R&D services in its feature article Independent R&D CEOs See Expanding Opportunities.

"This past year has been tremendously successful for us,” Curtis Carlson, CEO of SRI International told the magazine. “Over the past decade, we’ve conducted more than $2 billion in client-sponsored R&D and we’re seeing increased momentum in this work."

With the UK Government unloading some of its shares in QinetiQ, once a top-secret defence operation, we can expect to see more fleet footed labs touting their services.