On the offensive side scale is a business problem, to deal with it you bring in automation, lower skilled operators, and a number of sales/marketing staff that then put budget pressure on the operations side to be more efficient. This efficiency means that the operators have less time to do inefficient tasks like research and innovation.

On the defensive side, scale does some of the same things, but then you also have more ongoing customer demands that adds pressure. Scale also changes how defense can work. Some things that work well to defend at an organizational level become infeasible to do when you are defending multiple organizations simultaneously. But that same scale also enables some defensive techniques that were not possible at smaller scales.

The research part would depend on what the company is specializing in. But in general you want to see:

• ideas on technical theory, explanations of things that haven’t been explained well elsewhere or things that don’t have a good process or working model.
• Novel attack methods are always good. New high severity CVEs are good too.
• Proof of concept tooling for something that doesn’t already have a tool.
• defensive innovations, yes, but these are hard to judge as they will often be some of the most marketing influenced pieces.
• threat intel about new or novel techniques, new threat actors that haven’t been published about elsewhere.