Key R&D Themes

There is no shortage of challenges facing R&D managers in today’s world, but sources of practical help can be in short supply.

Rationale for selection of key themes

We asked R&D managers across a range of industry sectors, and within organisations of varying size, what topics they wanted to know more about. This revealed a list of subject areas where more information and advice would be helpful.

We have selected six of these to become ‘themes’ on the R&D Today website and invited some experienced practitioners and respected academics to curate each theme and contribute their own views and personal recommendations for good tools, papers and other resources.

As the dialogue has developed, we have extended the scope of the themes, adding additional themes that are emerging as areas of interest and aim to include comments and experience from other R&D professionals around the world.

If there is a subject that you feel would benefit from this treatment then do get in touch and if you would like to become a theme editor please see further details here.

Key R&D Theme Subjects

Roadmapping

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.

Managing the R&D pipeline

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.

Open Innovation

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.

Impact of digital technologies

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’.

Technology Strategy

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.

Managing international R&D

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.

Ideation and creativity in R&D

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.

Raspberry Pi is the epitome of “frugal” and “miniature” product mindset

The resurgence of frugal innovation

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.

Penetrating the fog of Agile

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!’

Belt and Road Initiative high speed train

China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a new model for Open Innovation

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.

Blind faith or hard evidence – does Design Thinking actually work in R&D?

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.

Would a ‘Strategy Lab’ provide sustainable renewal of competitive advantage?

The strategic renewal of competitive advantage is vital to sustain growth says Prof Lysander Weiss, he discusses the role of dynamic capabilities and outlines how these can be encapsulated in the Strategy Lab.