Public R&D labs in Mexico have been created recently and face an uncertain environment. Under pressure to become profitable in the short run, they struggle to develop technological competencies while at the same time trying to open industrial markets to locally developed technologies. This process faces important restrictions from other organizations in their environment: funding is scarce and unstable, industrial firms tend to rely on foreign technology, and government agencies in charge of directing S&T development lack a strong and clear institutional environment for them. In this context, public R&D labs have created strategies for development of technological competencies with different foci but also with some common features. Strategies have different degrees of success, but they also generate distinct sets of organizational tensions within them. In this paper we present results from an ongoing research project that develops intensive organizational case studies of the labs and compares their development strategies and organizational profiles. Management implications are treated at length, as well as S&T and industrial policy implications at the regional and national level, particularly with respect to the possibility of using the labs as anchors for the development of regional innovation systems.