Disclaimer: Still new to the game, so may be wildly off.
Currently, if you want to develop a new ship with new technology, you have to frequently stop designing the ship, and design the components. These then take research points, and thus require you to advance time further to research them. While reasonable enough, this also takes you away from designing the ship, and breaks your flow.
I have thought of several methods to work around this.
-Allow a generic research project that produces stored research points, like you can get at the start of the game. This requires and allows no scientist, so is drastically slower and less efficient than normal research. The points can then be used to instantly research technologies.
-Allow Research points to passively accumulate, say 10% of annual production.
-Allow Prototyping. On designing a component, it can then be used in any ship design. However, a ship with unresearched designs is incapable of being refitted for, or produced in any way.
In the case of Research points, it would make that mechanic more part of the game, rather than a starting boost/mechanic.
In the prototyping case, it would let you just design the whole ship, components included, optimize or w. e, and then, after you are finished designing it, THEN you can set the labs to research all the components required for it. No loss of flow or focus involved in having to advance time and react to other situations.