Editor's Note: The Truth About R&D

All right, it's time to come clean. Whichever consultancy was responsible for funding the greatest consulting juggernaut of all time, please make yourself known. It's time to grant your endeavor its rightful place in consulting history — a shelf inside the profession's trophy case, right above the Reenginering Memorial Cup inscribed to the fathers of reengineering themselves, Champy and Hammer. Of course, you may want to wait a while longer — not everyone will be pleased to know that the event otherwise known as Y2K was born right in your very own R&D laboratory.
We're not talking about the actual bug, of course, but the consulting phenomenon rooted in a small numeric glitch. And while some may challenge our contention that actual R&D consulting dollars were behind the Y2K phenomenon, I'd suspect we all agree that the consulting world has never been quite the same since the calendar dumped that first "1".
Of course, the rise of dot-com businesses did supply some jitters to the business world's corporate incumbents — prodding some to load up on Web services for a spell — but such impulsive corporate spending appears to have tapered off. In the aftermath of the Y2K groundswell and the dot-com collapse, the consulting world is now in search of a big idea, one that can help drive billions of dollars of consulting revenue, and one born within the painstaking procedures collectively known as R&D.
This issue, our cover story titled "The Truth About R&D" takes a look at how different firms are now in hot pursuit of the ideas and technologies that will help the consulting profession turn the page and enter a new world of opportunity. Few companies appear as well structured for R&D today as consulting firms, where R&D specialists are able to team around the world and learn simultaneously in diverse settings. But more than just having global reach, consultancies have the unique ability to build and leverage relationships with clients and technology partners, an advantage that allows consultants to discover value not on a blackboard, but at the place of its origins.
The R&D landscape within consulting appears to be a somewhat rocky terrain, however. Along the way, we raise the question of whether consulting firms are making the investments required to create such R&D juggernauts. While Laurence Prusak, executive director of IBM's Institute for Knowledge Management, answers the question with a resounding "No," Glover Ferguson, Accenture's chief scientist, gives the profession's overall R&D effort a "C plus."
Now, as a profession turns its lonely eyes to R&D, it's perhaps time to rethink the value of such endeavors and ponder the price the profession will pay for having a vacant shelf in its trophy case.