Global Engineering R&D Pulse Survey 2022

Markets world over have endured a series of shocks over the past 2 years – first the COVID-19 pandemic, and then its long-term implications on economy and supply chain, pushing every company into uncharted territories. While it is safe to say that every enterprise function has had to improvise and evolve to address the challenges it is facing, of particular interest is the Engineering Research and Development (ER&D) function, known for its levels of standardisation in work and delivery model historically.

The need for ER&D to adapt almost overnight to its teams being decentralised and the economic constraints compelling them to ‘do more with less’ have driven the function to effectively reinvent itself in the past year. But this has also opened new avenues of opportunity: as companies realise that even R&D (that traditionally operated out of a central physical location) could be run remotely, we are progressively seeing the function take risks with hybrid ways of working, digital engineering, new innovation acceleration models, and having even upstream work executed through globally distributed models.

The NASSCOM-Deloitte Global ER&D Pulse Survey 2022 attempts to put a finger on the pulse of the latest thinking and sentiment amongst the R&D leaders worldwide. The study yielded a number of key findings and trends that help predict how the function will transform in the coming years.