New approaches to develop innovative products and services are increasingly important in today's corporate environment. Leading edge solutions are more and more developed outside the structures of big corporations. Automation and digitisation are more and more influencing R&D processes both at the front-end and within the development process. This raises the question if corporate R&D departments as we know them will remain relevant in the future or if they will disrupt themselves and be replaced by alternative approaches. Within this paper, these alternative approaches will be analysed and evaluated critically in a hypothetical experiment concerning their disruption potential related to the traditional corporate R&D process.
