When answering the wicked problem of your company, the R&D strategy doesn’t need to rely on breaking the laws of physics or biology. What is most important is that you understand your customer’s pain point best, and solve it in a way no one has thought of before.

Compared to 20 years ago, the current proliferation of affordable, off-the-shelf parts available to inventors on the market allows a combinatorial explosion of possibilities of answering your customers’ needs. By taking advantage of what others have already built, using off-the-shelf parts is to be much faster and cheaper than designing and building your own version.