In order to determine if a firm should look at centralizing research or decentralizing research, the firm should first evaluate its size. Smaller organizations may not have sister organizations that would benefit from separating themselves from the central office. If a company is national or global reaching, then this analysis can get more in-depth. A Centralized office keeps all the decision-making for the company in one place and when new ideas or policies are finalized, they are then distributed to all company locations. The same idea works for R&D. Your company manages the one office in one location and ideas that come from that office are specific to what management has come up with. A de-centralized R&D department has multiple locations with many individual teams of employees working on multiple projects at any given time. De-centralized R&D can be a statistical and logistical nightmare to manage, but there are benefits. Each individual office is developing ideas specific to that region of the world where that office is located. Any successful projects then travel back to the central office for review and if management feels that there is a positive aspect to help other regions, the developments can be deployed there as well.

Centralized R&D:

Single department

Smaller workforce

De-centralized R&D:

Many individual teams

Many projects

Thoughts?