This is an interesting nugget about successful research integration into development pipeline.

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I congratulated him on being able to navigate the research and development divide, and asked him how he was able to do it. Don said that he previously interned at Intel, which had an established notion of a research pipeline unlike Microsoft and trained researchers on the proper steps to facilitate research into development.

At Intel, researchers were more closely involved in development. They were required to make proposals and identify the stage of their research — prototype, design, development, so on... As each stage proceeded, more development resources would be allocated to it, roughly double the amount before. The researcher had to be associated with a group, and must be able name a number of development contacts. A critical success factor is the researcher ability to convince a development group to invest money and resources into the idea—to bring in important stakeholders.

The culture of integrating research and development at Intel is probably due to the founders, Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore and Andy Grove, all having doctoral degrees and conducting significant research. Robert Noyce coinvented the integrated circuit and, had he lived long enough, would have shared the 2000 Nobel Prize given to coinventor Kilby; compare that to Bill Gates’s intellectual accomplishments." (Smart Software)