In a new innovation system, fusing R&D with expeditionary marketing creates a shared learning environment in which customers and suppliers experience future capabilities together. OVERVIEW: Improving the effectiveness of innovation requires R&D management to resolve the dilemma of risk management through the discovery of competitive capabilities for unclear stakeholder requirements. Mutually dependent learning must occur across separate groups: R&D, suppliers, customers, marketing, and other stakeholders. They must learn which new capabilities can be economically developed and how latent demands among potential customers can be met by those new capabilities. Because customers and other stakeholders need to experience new capabilities to adequately understand and assess their value, traditional market research is inadequate in revealing latent needs. To help resolve the dilemma, R&D is redefined in a new innovation system with a focus on leveraged and concurrent shared learning. Participatory research with stakeholder testing of prototypes is coupled with a new business process that concurrently develops capabilities and architecture. Architecture includes product platforms. The new innovation system, called Fourth Generation R&D, can improve the effectiveness of both incremental and radical R&D. The broader mission for R&D and the new innovation system complements recent concepts of business strategy such as strategic intent, core competencies, strategic architecture, and expeditionary marketing. Innovation is a major source of economic growth and development, yet very difficult to accomplish. The difficulty is partly due to the fragmentation of learning and the sequential nature of the traditional approach, which keeps vendors guessing about latent customer demand and customers guessing about possible future products and services before these products and services are delivered and used. Barriers and gaps exist in the traditional system of innovation that retard effective learning, encourage excessive guessing and politics, and sustain resistance to change. A broader view, in a new innovation system that we at Steelcase call Fourth Generation R&D, looks at traditional innovation as a system with too much isolation between groups of people who actually form separate communities of practice. These communities need more overlap in practice (more than communications) that generates new knowledge and capability. The overlap creates more effective, concurrent learning that shortens innovation cycle time, lessens risk and cuts cost. With earlier participation by partners and customers in a redefined model of R&D, the new process helps to discover and assess opportunities, while concurrently developing mutual stakeholder capability. The process treats multiple communities of practice as a knowledge infrastructure, which uses a collection of conceptual architectures to guide practice, and relies on another infrastructure of support tools and technology. Innovation requires changing the linked infrastructures. An architecture can provide a migration path for assets and practice, thereby facilitating innovation. Architecture, by defining the new structure of applications, can transform a radical innovation in technology into an S-curve of incremental innovations, each with increasing performance. Architecture coordinates innovation that spans multiple industrial sectors and communities of practice. Architecture also enables new capabilities to evolve in alignment with strategic plans. As strategy changes, revised capabilities and architecture need to be developed. These concepts of Fourth Generation R&D can be better understood following a brief analysis of the current situation of massive change. Forces of Change Change is occurring on many levels, on a global scale and within most business and work disciplines and relationships. What are the underlying forces of change and the appropriate responses by R&D management? …