Research labs are tool that many companies have used but that rarely result in innovations that make their way to the market.  In this blog post, author Scott Berkun details the problems inherent with R&D labs and claims the success of these labs depends most often on their relationships with product teams and not their technological brilliance or the number of breakthrough ideas they come up with.

Source: Scott Berkun
Link: http://www.scottberkun.com/blog/2007/why-research-labs-fail-at-innovation/