No matter what industry sector you operate in, company growth in a competitive world can hinge on superior R&D performance.

This working paper, produced by Gary P Pisano for the Harvard Business School, suggests that there is no single issue higher on the agenda of senior management than improving innovation performance.
The authors say that the failure of many companies to improve R&D performance is not due to lack of effort or commitment by the management or people involved but due to a misconception about the drivers of R&D performance. “There is no magic bullet,” the paper reports, “an R&D organisation is like any other system: performance hinges on the coherence between the components.”

Making an R&D organisation more competitive and effective involves consistent and coherent choices across architecture, processes, people and portfolio, according to the authors who suggest that the very first question which must be answered in strategy development is: what is our shared understanding of the root cause of the problem we are trying to solve.

Read the full paper:

Creating an R&D Strategy, Gary P Pisano, Harvard Business School, 2012

Recommended by Steve Bone, post by R&D Today admin