The ever increasing rate of technology development and the combination of new disciplines places increasing demands on competence management in R&D and, if companies fail to develop or target the wrong areas, the consequences are greater and it’s harder to recover in time. One of the greatest inefficiencies in R&D is bottlenecks and delays in getting products to market, often due to resource constraints, hits companies hard. Best practices identified include:  resilience in resourcing plans to avoid bottlenecks, taking a long term view on competencies for the future and develop knowledge by investing in capability building projects and by linking internal and external networks.