Research and development: how the ‘D’ got into R&D

This paper traces the history of the concept of research and development (R&D) through 70 years of work on taxonomies and statistics on research. It identifies three stages in the construction of development as a category. First, development was only a series or list of activities without a label, but identified for inclusion in questionnaire responses. Second, development came to be identified as such by way of creating a subcategory of research, alongside basic and applied research. Third, development became a separate category, alongside research. It gave us the acronym we now know and use: R&D. Although it is a category of industrial origins, three factors contributed to the inclusion of development in official definitions of research: organizational, analytical, and political.