Tag: "corporate culture"

Bridging the Gap Between Marketing and R&D

Ever wonder why the R&D function has trouble “sync-ing” with the Marketing department. Marketing should drive most innovation because marketing has the pulse of the consumer and a sense of consumer trends, and R&D can introduce new technologies that can justify some new product development. Just based on differences in timing alone, Marketing historically can develop product concepts faster than R&D can formulate them for commercialization. It isn’t surprising Marketing and R&D often act as separate silos.

In the bigger picture, Marketing and R&D each have responsibilities towards other parts of the whole corporate organization. For example, Marketing, with feedback from the sales force, has to inform the manufacturing function which products to make and R&D needs to formulate the products in a manner that enables the manufacturing function to make the products efficiently. So common responsibilities to other third-parties within the organization should provide them some common ground.

Sharing essential information between R&D and Marketing and understanding respective needs goes far to “de-silo” Marketing and R&D. For example, R&D will understand pricing and profitability,value identification and maximization, and differentiation and positioning, and Marketing will understand regulatory constraints, product quality, and processing and stability issues. This common understanding of separate needs will help provide syncrony between these functions.

Effective coordination is putatively viewed as a key success factor in competitiveness. For successful companies, new product development represents incremental sales of at least 10% or more depending on the product sector.

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Jan 30, 2011 | 0 comments View Post

How come innovation make CEOs uncomfortable

Essentially, it’s fear. Fear of the uncertainty and unknown. What is the pay back, the ROI? Their bosses and shareholders need a defined path to future profits and sales.

Innovation is not an exact science, nor will it ever be. We can assemble the information about the consumer needs, develop and maintain the skill sets required to implement a development program, and manage the efforts according to Gantt charts toward product launch; however, it is the soft stuff, the art, the loss of control when instilling responsibility to others in the organization that truly enables innovation.

Jeffrey Phillips blogs on http://innovateonpurpose.com (January 4, 2011) that the Brownian motion of innovation that makes executive uncomfortable because it is easy to manage and control, requires a belief system, and risk taking that organizations are often willing to support or reward.

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Jan 09, 2011 | 0 comments View Post

Facets of Innovation

Leading to the Marketplace

Success looks like having an integrated, collaborative, accountable innovation process that leads to a diversified and full pipeline, as repeatable, sustainable, and with speed to concept.

There is a need to establish an approach and process to innovation. Success can also be attained with the presence of dedicated and focused resources including the need for a cross-functional core team. They provide oversight that culls all elements and identify areas and opportunities: marketing, R&D, packaging of consumer insights, claims landscapes, emerging science, previous conducted research/evidence/ideas, discovery/bioactives, health professional insights, global landscape, external marketplace/health trends.

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Jan 26, 2010 | 0 comments View Post

Creating Creativity: Diverse associates stur the pot of new ideas

Having trouble with getting thoughts of creativity?

Identify a problem, and  and writing nothing but questions about it for 10 minutes a day for 30 days. He says that over that period the questions will change, and so will your understanding and approach to the problem. To build your observation skills, identify a busin ess, customer, supplier, or client, and spend a day or two watching how they work so you can better understand the issues they have to deal with. In a recent CNN interview, Marc Ventresca, a lecturer in strategic management at the University of Oxford Saïd Business School, agrees that innovation is not an inherent trait, but a set of skills that people can learn.

He says the goal is not simply knowing lots of people, but knowing people from varied backgrounds, who work for different companies, in different industries, have different skills, and deal with different issues, so that you are exposed to varied ideas.

When it comes to developing your ability to innovate, Ventresca recommends simply setting aside 30 minutes a week to talk with a contact you wouldn’t normally talk to — for example someone you met at conference six months ago. Ventresca says about 10 of those members yield something interesting, and two of those 10 let you do something new and valuable — by investing just 26 hours a year you’ve come up with something pretty remarkable.

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Dec 16, 2009 | 0 comments View Post

R&D Scenario Planning will Enable Adaptability

Scenario planning is not something done only in the executive suite or in the marketing department. R&D needs to conduct their own scenario planning based on executive and marketing counterparts. Consider resource constraints, adequate supply of scientists in the specialty disciplines that augment your core competencies, additional parameters that drive scenarios, global implications, and evolving regulatory environments when developing your scenarios. Using these considerations often facilitate developing your near- and long-term scenarios and make your R&D more adaptable to changes.

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Nov 18, 2009 | 0 comments View Post

The Pace and Cadence of Innovation

Surges can be anticipated

Surges can be anticipated

Let’s face it, innovation is not like a finely-tuned engine operating at optimum capacity all of the time. How do you anticipate the ebbs and flows that invariably crop up with the pace of innovation, let alone the workload (which is often independent of innovation)? How do handle the inevitable slow periods of innovation? How do you spark the team out of an innovation slump? What metrics beyond gut feel do you use to measure the current pace of innovation?

To start, let your team see the big picture, to remind and spark their intuitive skills and abilities. Seeing the big picture allows your team to make insights and set directions whereas everyday working events tend to keep their attention.

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Oct 18, 2009 | 1 comment View Post

Leadership as Visionary Servitude

Delicate Arch 2006

Nature's size is humbling

Much has been expressed about leadership in the written and video media. Much of what is expressed is how to establish a roadmap for your tenure, to direct those to walk that road, and to interact with peers and other stakeholders to facilitate alignment with your plans.

My experience enables a view of visionary servitude. Yes, leadership takes vision, but what about servitude? Most everyone can understand the need for servitute down the totem ploe. Yet, the individuals who are best at sustaining their leadership role believe and act in a manner to serve others around them–up, down, and across from them in theorganization. It takes inner strength and humillity to gain and maintain an attitude of servitude, especially when so many competing interests create challenges to this state of mind. Keep in mind that humility has always been distinct from a state of humiliation. Servitude works best when it pervades the organization, from top to bottom.

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Sep 27, 2009 | 0 comments View Post

Innovation Hotspots

Are there certain locations around the globe that promote and support an innovation mindset? Can a city provide an environment that enables innovation rather than just an organization? Richard Florida, social researcher and consultant, coined the term “creative class,” and has authored Who’s Your City, identifies the following factors: diversity, innovation functions, patents per capita, a presence of a high tech industry, and the percentage of the workforce made up of the “creative class,” typically in the U.S., some 40 million workers who are scientists, engineers, computer programmers who work in the health care, business and finance, and education sectors, whether or not they are affiliated with an organization.

The most innovative U.S. cities are cited as Austin, Seattle, Portland OR, Washington DC, and San Francisco. Globally, Helsinki, Singapore, and Shanghai are credited as innovation hubs.

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Sep 12, 2009 | 0 comments View Post

Metrics: Measure your productivity

Most executives believe that innovation will enable their company to stand out in the marketplace, especially in this economy. Yet, executives do not develop the strategies and execute the follow through necessary to create their innovation environment.

How do you measure that innovation has been optimized? Especially for use as a performance assessment tool? It is not as simple as the perecentage of sales from products introduced within the last five years. Each industry has its on uptake pattern for new products and each category of product has its own lifecycle.

Decisions on product development to proceed to market is based on getting the right information to the right persons at the right time. Optimum information flow requires open communication. One or two key metrics will provide focus, and other metrics help to define other areas that need help.

Using sports as an analogy, the final score of the game is what really matters as the focal point to measure performance, whereas other metrics can be used to illuminate areas needing improvement. In other situations, the obvious problems will arise without the use of metrics.

Clearly,innovation must be driven from the top executive on down throughout the organization. Where do you start? Start in a small part of the organization, assess, fine tune, and modify to optimize for the whole organization.

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Sep 04, 2009 | 0 comments View Post

Setting the Example as a Leader

What are the qualities of being a leader? Let’s get to the point: be tactically and technically proficient:
- Know yourself and seek self-improvement, making sound and timely decisions
- Know your colleagues and look out for their welfare, keeping them informed
- Ensure the task is understood, supervised and accomplished
- Train your colleagues as a team, in accordance with their capabilities
- Develop a sense of responsibility in your colleagues
- Seek responsibility and take responsibility for your actions

People are diverse in their interests, talents and skills, and this diversity fuels the success of the team, and in turn, your success. It is key that a leader creates momentum in the organization and engage the people to understand simply what good looks like and create an environment where they feel empowered to really contribute you need to know and be able to deliver operational performance/results and have to have a certain knowledge to be able to credibly lead and drive improvements. In the words of the psychologist, Carl Jung: “we should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect; we apprehend it just as much by feeling. Therefore, the judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth, and must, if it be honest, also come to an understanding of its inadequacy” (Psychological Types, or, The Psychology of Individuation, p. 628, 1921). Albert Einstein said something with similar meaning: “the search and striving for truth and knowledge is one of the highest of man’s qualities – though often, the pride is most loudly voiced by those who strive the least. And certainly we should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality. It cannot lead, it can only serve; and it is not fastidious in its choice of a leader. This characteristic is reflected in the qualities of its priests, the intellectuals. The intellect has a sharp eye for methods and tools, but is blind to ends and values. So it is no wonder that this fatal blindness is handed on from old to young and today involves a whole generation” (excerpted from: The Goal of Human Existence, November 4, 1943).

The power of balancing one’s technical and people skills, allowing a diversity of thought, backgrounds, and productive behavior drives a sustainable innovation culture. Applying these qualities and behaviors to the innovation environment and using the technical and people skills leads to a sustainable innovation environment. These qualities help the innovation environment develop as one develops their internal and external innovation networks.

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Jul 21, 2009 | 0 comments View Post
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