Some large conglomerates, such as General Electric and United Technologies, have captive research labs. However, such facilities tend to return little on their investments. Because of the high cost of maintaining such research facilities, even some larger companies, such as Dow Corning, have cut in-house research budgets.

Without in-house research programs, these companies must outsource exploratory or incremental improvement research, which can be prohibitively expensive.

As an alternative, WJS Concepts LLC has developed an experimental concept during the past year—"researchers-for-hire" that perform research and proof-of-concept development, without massive overhead. Unlike traditional engineering consultants, the contracted researcher actually performs the work and writes reports. When research is successful, the contractor then assists scale-up or implementation on the production line and trains in-house staff.