Efficient R&D-processes are crucial for a company’s long-term competitiveness. For large companies this often is salient in both their missions and control processes and an amount of research has been performed in order to describe and support control of R&D in these companies. On development processes in smaller companies, however, less research has been performed. In this paper we report an action research project with the aim of gaining understanding of the control of development processes in smaller service companies. Our intention was to investigate in the function of boards of directors and the management control systems with respect to R&D and to develop a model for how R&D processes are perceived and controlled in this kind of companies. The outcome is prototypes, a creation of models that are interactively refined in the seminars, leading to new and more elaborated prototypes. During the prototyping a new shared language was created where the scientific language of the researchers and the everyday language of the practitioners merged into a local understanding of development processes in smaller companies. The results support earlier research in the area, but with larger emphasis on parallel processes, customers’ interactions and development as a local embedded activity rather than laboratory work. For these activities boards of directors put the frame, but do not get involved, while management control system support with information rather than control.