Your R&D operation should be doing far more than inventing the next great thing. It should be creating the business process that will make your entire company more flexible and innovative. As companies try to keep pace with rapid changes in technology and cope with unstable business environments, their research departments have to do more than simply invent new products. They must design the new technological and organizational architectures that make a contiuously innovating company possible. In this 1991 artcile, John Seely Brown, then director of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), describes the business logic behind this distinctive vision of research's role and the ways Xerox PARC tried to realize that vision. It researchers developed prototypes of new work practices as well as new technologies and products. Xerox's business is technology, but Seely Brown argues that any company, no matter what its business, must eventually grapple with the issues he raises. The successfull company of the future must understand how people really work and must adapt its technology to the work rather than the other way around. It must know how to create an environment that allows for continuous innovation by all employees. It must rethink traditional business assumptions and tap into needs that customers don't even know they have. In essence, he argues, the most important invention that will come out of the corporate research lab in the future will be the corporation itself