Research Technology Management

New Innovation Architectures Will Shape R&D 'Lab' of the Future

After more than a century of focus on internal, proprietary R&D as the driver for industrial innovation, today's managers face a dramatically different, more complex and difficult environment. While innovation is a perennial topic, the pace of change has so quickened in recent decades that the Global 500 executives surveyed annually by IBM have listed innovation at the top of their principal strategic concerns for the past decade. During this time, products and even services have become i...

Recession Pushing Innovation in New Directions

The constraints created by the impact of the global financial crisis on the West, and by the limited spending power of developing countries, are changing the way people and companies innovate, according to speakers at a conference held by The Economist newspaper in London in October. Recessions have always prompted innovation. What may be new this time around is an increasing sense among some young people that they cannot rely on large companies to provide for them any more. One way forward m...

Ge Seeks Green by Going Green

In 2005, GE launched what it called its "ecomagination initiative," which it intended to meet customers' demands for more energy-efficient products and, in the process, improve the company's bottom line. The approach has a natural fit with GE's corporate footprint, which covers a wide range of industries and locations. GE's businesses that have benefited from ecomagination's products and services so far include energy, transportation, consumer & industrial, oil & gas, water & proc...

East Europe Innovation Still Far Behind West

The torrent of political events across Europe has brought huge change to the region, not only economically but also scientifically, and with some pain. For Germany, in particular, the fall of the Wall led to a deliberate, organized effort to support top East German scientists and to create scientific centers of excellence in the former East Germany. Some experts argue that innovation is more important to developed countries than to developing ones for spurring growth. They contend that poor a...

News Brief

Managing Design and Technology

Mastering Technologies in Design-Driven Innovation

Only a few companies have mastered the design-driven approach to innovation. This paper examines what it means to make design a central part of the business process, able to add value to products and create new markets. More specifically, it focuses on the interplay between the functional and semantic dimensions of a product. Case studies of two leading Italian companies in the furniture industry-Kartell and Luceplan-illustrate two principal interpretations of the role of technology in radica...

Managing Risk in Pharmaceutical R&D

Risk is a powerful force in innovative organizations for the obvious reason that it means the future outcomes of decisions are uncertain and, less obviously, because it can foster decision biases like loss aversion and over-optimism. Decision biases at one level are often counterbalanced by different biases at other levels of a firm. Two archetypal approaches to managing risk in R&D-so-called "buckshot" vs. "birdshot" risk strategies-hold implications for organizational performance in the...

Technology Management at Rolls-Royce

Technology management tools, such as technology roadmapping, have received significant attention in Rolls-Royce and other manufacturing organizations. Yet, these tools have often been treated and used in isolation. Organizations that consider implementing such practices should employ an integrated framework to ensure timely technology investment decisions and capability development. To achieve integration, organizations need to consider the ownership, data and timing of each of the tools acro...

Valuing and Comparing Small Portfolios

Many of the tools used in valuing and selecting projects are justifiably applicable only to large portfolios because they assess value by using statistical concepts, such as probability, mean and risk. However, portfolios are seldom large enough for this to be valid. Nevertheless, it is possible to compare projects and select a small portfolio in a simple and logically-defensible way by appropriately analyzing the distribution of outcomes that can be predicted for each project. Each project i...

Upgrade Your New-Product Machine

Where a company's new product development process is inferior to its manufacturing process, in terms of defect rate and overall effectiveness, a process called New Product Blueprinting can help its managers to close the gap. This process is a means of upgrading the "fuzzy front end" of new-product development. It builds on the Stage-Gate process and forces an "outside-in" perspective by fully engaging customers in a set of discovery and preference interviews. Guesswork is taken out of product...

Learn Change Leadership From Two Great Teachers

If you need to change your organization, to make it more efficient and effective, the author advises you to first get acquainted with the thinking of W. Edwards Deming (1900-1993) and Russell Ackoff (1919-2009). He had the very good fortune to learn directly from both of these theorists who have contributed so much to your most advanced understanding of change leadership. Ackoff's theories helped the author to understand how to design organizations with the built-in variability and interactiv...

Merge Ahead: Mastering the Five Enduring Trends of Artful M&A

Merge Ahead: Mastering the Five Enduring Trends of Artful M&A, by Gerald Adolf, Justin Pettit, and Michael Sisk, is reviewed.

What It Takes to Be an Innovator

What It Takes To Be an Innovator, by Gerard H. (Gus) Gaynor, is reviewed.

Oecd Science, Technology and Industry Scoreboard 2009

2010 Global R&D Funding Forecast

Entrepreneurial Marketing Strategy: Lessons From the Red Queen

What's so Special About Special Ops?