Surely there are more types of corporate research teams than four, but I still find the formulation instructive. I can see why these types of research activities deserve treatment and discussion. Further, the article made its point neatly in just a few paragraphs.
You could equally divide R&D teams in many other ways, eg. academic vs. startup vs. bigco, shipping vs. pre-market, targeted vs. wandering, focused vs. scattergun, single domain vs. cross-domain, business focused vs. possibility focused, full time vs. part time, dedicated space and facility vs. shared with production, etc.
You could probably add like 10 more categories to this if you include actual traditional engineering companies (e.g. mechanical engineering). I do a lot of simulations myself with real models and haven't done any super theoretical journal work yet.
The http://www.newardassociates.com/bio.html has enough information about this person that I really don't think their explanation of R&D makes sense.
Completely missing is e.g. simulation or in general evaluation of designs. In my experience teams also do multiple tasks, e.g. when you are doing simulations you also have to look at how the simulation can be improved or whether repetitive simulation tasks can be automated. Nobody besides your team could do do this research on new methods, simply because nobody else really understands your tasks and activities.