Research and Development

The phrase "Research and Development" (also appearing as "R and D" or as "R&D") has a special commercial significance apart from its conventional coupling of research and technological development. In the context of commerce, "Research and Development" normally refers to future-oriented, longer-term activities in science and/or technology, mimicking scientific research in their (relative) disregard of the traditional accountant's questions of the type: "But what are the commercial applications?".

Statistics on the proportion of an organisational budget devoted to "R&D" (like statistics on numbers of patents or on rates of peer-reviewed publications) may express the state of an industry, the degree of competition or the lure of scientific progress.