Research projects in a small company

How do you take time to do pure research on new technologies in a small company?  This is not a rhetorical question.  Small business teams rarely have the money to justify spending months on research.

It is usually a case of build what works and run with it, so when do you get the time to do that research?  Without ongoing research into new technologies and designs you have to find a way to fund those activities. Building a product by growing things in place is a good way to accrue a lot of technical debt that eventually leads to a fragile design or a complete rewrite.

How do other companies handle this?

Ok, this is my personal answer to the question; Your Mileage May Vary (YMMV). It may or may not be correct for everyone, or every situation.  I want to share parts of how I came to this conclusion in the hopes that it may help other small companies.

I have always believed that any product without continuous development is dead.  How can a product innovate without new work being done on it?  Only through investigation and application of technology can a company learn to innovate.  Otherwise you are just playing catch up with others in your market and telling the developers to do what you competitor just did.  Sure, maybe you improve it a bit, add some polish.  But without looking way ahead of the pack you will never leap frog anyone.

In large companies they usually handle this by having multiple teams.  Team A is on the current release, and Team B is looking at the next major.  Then they flip flop when Team B is ready for production Team A then goes into looking at the next major release.  Small businesses can’t afford to employ this strategy.

Some companies do this by having a long release cycle.  They release 1.0, then spend 2 years getting to 2.0, etc.  This leads to long cycles of no improvement in the product, but for some industries this is acceptable.

Most small companies iterate over their design making small improvements and adding customer features.  At some point it seems like “enough” changes and they rev the major.  Some small companies ignore the problem entirely and call everything Product 2009, Product 2010.  Basically telling you that they are all the same, but with some form of improvement over time.

There is nothing wrong with any of these strategies, but they don’t work in our scenario.  We have large research work to do in some fields that just can’t be iterated into the core product at all.  They are literally all or nothing scenarios. You could spend a year of effort to build it into the core engine only to discover it doesn’t work well.

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