Concurrent Exploration and Research Management: Case Study Featuring a Speciality Chemicals Company

For innovation to serve as a differentiating factor on saturated markets, it must increasingly drive signifi cant disruptions in the scientifi c and technical fi elds. Whereas in the early 1990s changes in design processes mostly focused on product development engineering with the rollout of project management and concurrent engineering models (Clark and Fujimoto, 1991; Charue-Duboc and Midler 2002), such changes now involve upstream exploration activities and consequently, research departments (Lenfl e 2001; Le Masson 2001).