Development (R&D) and Innovation are key factors in the seed industry, which have enabled outstanding achievements with impressive productivity gains in the last century. The resultant prosperity has ensured an abundant and safe food supply to suffice the needs of an ever growing global population. Remarkable successes which energized and empowered the green revolution relied to a great extent on public funds supporting research in public institutions. Today, however, R&D plays a crucial role in the growth of private companies and consequently they are making sizeable investments in R & D. There has been a paradigm shift in crop variety R&D over the past 30 years, which has evolved from being predominantly public to predominantly private.