Research potentials and project funding decisions

At first, we shall restrict ourselves to the project level of research. Research projects should not be selected arbitrarily. Companies have to find out which projects are more important for their future development and which are of less importance. Takeda, who is responsible for Hitachi’s R&D activities, calls research that is performed in this sense ‘north star research’, contrary to ‘blue sky research’. The north star and the blue sky are both far away from the earth, but only the former offers a definite direction. The blue sky would only signal that research goals are far different from where we stand now, but provides itself no specific direction. The same views were expressed by German research managers. One of them says: “We don’t do things that live in cloud-cuckoo-land” (Berthold, 1968, pp.- 198, 200). Here again, the idea of choosing a direction for company research is clearly voiced: research needs to be targeted.