> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://hoeijmakers.net/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # R&D was there all along - URL: https://hoeijmakers.net/research-and-development/ - Published: 2026-10-03T14:34:50.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-03T15:37:04.000Z - Description: I had been writing about how knowledge becomes technology for a year without quite naming the activity at the heart of it. Then I went back to R&D. - Author: Rob Hoeijmakers - Tags: R&D Over the past year, I have written quite a lot about innovation. Deeptech startups. Venture capital. Universities and research institutes. European innovation programmes. Industrial policy. The difficult journey from laboratory to factory. More recently, I have been trying to understand the landscape behind all this. Who creates knowledge? Who funds it? Where do ideas become technologies, technologies become companies, and companies become industries? And then I noticed something rather obvious. I had been writing about R&D without really knowing what I meant by it. Perhaps I should have noticed earlier. I grew up around Philips. As a child, I visited the Evoluon in Eindhoven: a flying saucer in the middle of an industrial city, filled with science and technology you were allowed to touch. Behind it sat something I could not see. Philips had built an enormous research capability. Its NatLab brought fundamental science and practical experimentation together. Work within Philips contributed to radio, X-ray systems, the compact cassette and compact disc. Its semiconductor activities would eventually help give rise to companies such as ASML and NXP. I don't want to romanticise that world. But I think growing up around it left me with an idea I have carried for much longer than I realised. Technology does not simply appear. Somebody has to create the knowledge from which it becomes possible. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/27/2027934d-fd7f-4725-bcbf-86fe1f55dd12/content/images/2026/10/image.jpeg) Evaluon Eindhoven ## So what is R&D? Once I actually looked up the definition, I found it surprisingly useful. The [OECD](https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2015/10/frascati-manual-2015%5Fg1g57dcb/9789264239012-en.pdf) defines research and experimental development as creative and systematic work undertaken to increase our stock of knowledge and devise new applications for existing knowledge. It involves novelty, creativity and uncertainty. That makes R&D much more specific than “doing something innovative”. It also means R&D is not a department or even a type of organisation. It is an activity. It can happen inside a university, a government laboratory, a multinational or a five-person startup. And it is not the same thing as innovation. An invention can exist without anybody using it. R&D can produce knowledge without producing a company. Innovation begins when something new or substantially improved actually makes the transition into use. This gives me a better grammar for something I have been trying to understand for some time. Research, invention, innovation, startups, scale-ups and industrialisation are not different words for technological progress. They describe different activities and transitions within it. And those transitions matter. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/27/2027934d-fd7f-4725-bcbf-86fe1f55dd12/content/images/2026/10/IMG_0178.png) **A conceptual map of the journey from new knowledge to real-world use. The activities, organisations and uncertainties overlap rather than forming a simple linear pipeline.* ## The startup didn't replace R&D Much of the modern technology story is told through the startup. A founder sees an opportunity, starts a company, raises venture capital, finds product-market fit and scales. That model has been extraordinarily productive, particularly in software. But deeptech makes its limits visible. A social app can be built by a small team with laptops and cloud computing. A new semiconductor process, battery chemistry, medicine, nuclear reactor or quantum computer inhabits a different world. Laboratories, specialised equipment, scientific expertise, regulatory approval, manufacturing capability and patient capital enter the picture. Years can pass before anybody knows whether the underlying technology works, let alone whether there is a scalable company inside it. The startup did not replace R&D. In many cases, it became another place where R&D happens. ## From lab to fab That also changes how I think about Europe's technology problem. We often collapse very different questions into one word: innovation. We compare scientific publications, patents, R&D expenditure, venture capital, unicorns, scale-ups and industrial competitiveness as though they measured the same underlying thing. They don't. A country can produce excellent science and struggle to commercialise it. It can create startups and fail to scale them. It can invent technologies and manufacture very little of them. So perhaps the interesting question is not whether Europe is innovative. It is where knowledge, technology, capital and companies stop moving. That is the journey I have increasingly been thinking of as [**lab to fab**](https://hoeijmakers.net/from-lab-to-fab-needs-more-than-a-fund/). And R&D sits somewhere near its heart: the deliberate confrontation with uncertainty required to know something we did not know before, or make something possible that was not possible before. Seen this way, R&D spending is more than another economic indicator. It says something about how much capacity a society maintains to investigate an uncertain future. And suddenly quite a few things I thought I was interested in separately begin to connect. AI, because it is becoming an instrument of research itself. [Quantum computing](https://hoeijmakers.net/tag/quantum-computing/), because enormous research programmes are trying to turn difficult physics into usable machines. Deeptech, because scientific uncertainty changes the economics of building companies. Europe, because technological sovereignty requires more than buying technologies invented elsewhere. And, unexpectedly, Philips. The child walking through the Evoluon, the technology companies I later worked for, my present work with AI and my recent curiosity about quantum computing are not as disconnected as I thought. Somewhere underneath them is the same fascination: **how knowledge becomes technology, and how technology becomes part of the world.** I have spent much of the past year writing about what happens around that process. It is time I paid more attention to what happens inside it. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/27/2027934d-fd7f-4725-bcbf-86fe1f55dd12/content/images/2026/10/image-1.jpeg) Former NatLab (physics lab)