Organizational flexibility in the Japanese corporate R&D setting

The authors present the preliminary results of an inquiry into the organizational flexibility within the corporate R&D setting in Japan from a survey of 106 laboratories conducted in 1990. Three major findings regarding the organizational flexibility of R&D laboratories in Japan emerge from the survey. First, strategic research though currently present in only a minority of R&D laboratories, seems destined to be more widely adopted. Second, among the various operating systems in use, those that aim at facilitating the face-to-face collective exchange of ideas are the most highly valued. Third, providing individual researchers with a higher degree of autonomy of decision seems to encounter a perceptible degree of opposition from the Japanese corporate R&D management