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What Skills Should R&D Teams Cultivate?

By NAM NewsroomNovember 5, 2026

What skills will research and development teams need to succeed in the years ahead? The first phase of a new study from the Innovation Research Interchange, the NAM’s innovation division, offers some answers.

The research: “Future R&D Capabilities: Phase I Study: Top Skills Needed for Successful R&D Teams” examines how organizations’ R&D capabilities “will need to evolve over the next five to seven years—and what it will take to get there.”

  • The report finds that technology alone won’t determine success in a new era of R&D.
  • Instead, organizations will need “new levels of AI fluency, technical expertise, critical and systems thinking and business understanding.”
  • The report draws on several IRI sources, including The Edge of What’s Next, its quarterly trends analyzer, its annual Innovators Summit and its R&D Trends Forecast.

What it means: Organizations must invest now in developing talent, strengthening collaboration, preserving institutional knowledge and preparing leaders to guide AI-enabled R&D teams.

A shift: In 2025, R&D leaders focused primarily on navigating uncertainty, including the growing adoption of AI, the study found.

  • In 2026, their attention shifted toward identifying the capabilities organizations will need to succeed.

The R&D team of the future: At the 2026 Innovators Summit, participants identified and ranked the importance of team attributes to the “R&D organization of the future.” Key among the findings:

  • Communication and relationship building ranked first, followed closely by business acumen and strategic insight.
  • Systems thinking and integration, influence without authority, AI and digital fluency were identified as key, with knowledge integration and reuse rounding out the top 10.
  • The results, according to the report, “illustrate that future R&D teams will need much more than technical depth alone.”

The last word: “[T]he future of R&D will be shaped not by technology adoption alone, but by the ability of organizations to build the capabilities needed to work effectively in an AI-enabled, globally connected and increasingly complex innovation environment.”

Up next: The IRI will launch Phase 2 of the study at Innovating the Future 2026, which will take place Dec. 2–3 in Orlando, Florida.