Greater use of all sources of capital – finance, social, environmental – can lead to the creation of more sustainable business models, according to Peter Ball, Professor of Operations Management at the School for Business and Society, University of York.
AI technologies are evolving at the fastest speed and organisations are rapidly adopting these technologies. However, relatively little is known about the precise role of AI as an agent of innovation. RADMA scholar Soo Young Choi investigated this fascinating subject
“What is the worst thing that you can do in a time of pandemic? Wait and sit it out.” This advice from Prof Oliver Gassman struck home for Professor Petra de Weerd-Nederhof as she prepared her inaugural lecture.
![PepsiCo's North American Beverages fleet [image credit: Melissa Golden; PepsiCo - from PepsiCo.com]](https://www.rndtoday.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/PepsiCos-North-America-Beverages-Fleet-credit-PepsiCo-web-768x512.jpg)
PepsiCo transformed its organization by adopting a design thinking approach. Researchers identified nine design thinking practices that could lead to organizational innovation
10th – 12th January 2024, University of Manchester
17-19 June 2024 at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.
The 2023 Conference will focus on the theme ‘Responsible and Responsive Innovation for a Better Future’ and will take place on 19 – 21 June 2023 at Pablo de Olavide University, Seville, Spain.
R&D Today is the outreach site for the Research and Development Management Association, a charitable organisation that supports research, best practice and innovation. www.radma.net https://www.radma.net
It is estimated that as few as 10% of new R&D projects are successful, so finding ways to navigate the disruption, reimagine better futures and out-innovate the competition is at the top of every R&D agenda. One emerging prescription that’s getting a lot of attention is design thinking, and it is increasingly being adopted in R&D departments and teams.
China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a strategy initiated by the People’s Republic of China that seeks to connect Asia with Africa and Europe via land and maritime networks. It aims to improve regional integration, increase trade and stimulate economic growth.
I was recently asked to review an innovation project developing new sustainable products. Sustainability is usually a good topic for sparking heated debates, but on sustainability the team seemed pretty aligned. One area they did argue about was Agile. They decided to use Agile in their project, but the halfway house that they ended up with created a lot of friction. The tension revolved around the definition: ‘This isn’t Agile!’
From the perspective of economic and societal revival, frugal innovation serves as a new paradigm of thinking, processing, and development of products or services. Embedded within its core, is the mantra of doing more, with less, for more people.
Creativity and ideation is a vital part of the R&D process and one that is of great interest to managers. Creativity can seem quite a messy discipline, but I find it useful to categorise it into 4 aspects: process, people, product and place. This classification is based on the 4P’s of creativity developed by the pioneering US creativity researcher, Mel Rhodes.
There are many challenges when managing international R&D; some of these are similar to those of international management in general but some elements come into sharper focus due to the concentrated nature of the knowledge assets.
A technology strategy that is aligned with the corporate mission can help focus R&D on doing the right things for growth. It can also support the R&D manager when making difficult decisions such as how to restructure the department or manage the product portfolio. It can also help objectively identify the right technology opportunities and defend from possible technology disrupters.
To exploit digital technologies, new models are emerging that support mutually beneficial collaborations between established corporations and early stage companies. These range from the financially focused ‘Corporate Venture Capital’ to the innovation outcomes-oriented ‘Consortium Accelerator’.
![The Permeable Funnel [click to enlarge]](https://www.rndtoday.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Permeable-Funnel-768x501.jpg)
Open Innovation (OI) is an approach whereby organisations, originally companies but increasingly governments and NGOs, seek to collaborate with others to deliver innovation. Innovation is naturally a collaborative activity, but the practice really came to the attention of practitioners and academics when Henry Chesbrough coined the phrase ‘Open Innovation’ in 2003 in a book of the same name.
This theme could equally have been titled ‘Collaborative Innovation’, and we’ll be embracing best practice and learning from all manner of such activities.
For many companies the R&D pipeline contains ‘the future of the company’ as it is the main and often the only, source of future products. Therefore managing the pipeline is a business function, not just a technical one.
Roadmapping is a powerful technique for planning an organisation’s technological capabilities to ensure they meet its commercial or strategic goals.
The concept provides a metaphorical image of a roadmap being used to navigate a business through partly known/unknown territories.
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R&D Today is the outreach site for the Research and Development Management Association, a charitable organisation that supports research, best practice and innovation. www.radma.net
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