Tag: "organizations"

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

Global Steps in Innovation

Many folks liken the process of innovation to a baseball diamond:

First base – Vision

Second base – Strategy

Third base – Ranking priorities

Home – Alignment of resources: people, places, services.

We need the relevant people who share a common understanding of the vision and the strategy, accept the validity of that direction, and have a passionate commitment to make it work. We also need senior executive leadership support, a comprehensive, adaptable communication plan, a contract for buy-in to goals & direction, a creative focus on the few highest priority initiatives, as well as a governance process for investment (priorities), aligned pay-for-performance metrics, group leadership development, values-based goals, milestones & metrics.

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Jan 15, 2010 | 0 comments View Post

Innovation environments: Conflicts affect performance

Conflict is inevitable in environments in which more than one opinion is need to be successful. Managing conflict is a major component for optimizing innovation environments. Individuals attracted to engineering and the sciences are often not those who know how to cope easily with conflict and often seek to avoid confrontation. Moreover, when conflict occurs individual performance and that of the team are diminished. Two-thirds of perceived performance issues are actually conflict related rather than to actual performance or skills competencies. In the book Crucial Conversations, strategies and processes are presented to identify and resolve conflicts.  Rapid conflict resolution greatly speeds innovation.

Several other observations are notable regarding conflict resolution, performance and the nature of innovation: those that score highly on active constructive behaviors and perceptions of leadership are promotable, potential creativity among team members is ubiquitous, a moment, an attitude, or a belief. The most pertinent point: there is more than one right answer. Sometimes we stop at the first right answer and we need to break our pattern of instant focus by letting the idea percolate. One way: try reframing the idea, change the lens, and triangulate with market needs.

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Jan 07, 2010 | 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

Outsourcing Innovation for Greater ROI

Large companies appear to have all of the skill sets necessary to sustain innovation, yet appearance can be deceiving–one cannot valuate what they cannot measure, lost opportunities. Companies have begun to outsource innovation (a.k.a. open innovation) to maximize their opportunities, yet it is important to minimize transaction costs of administering projects, whether outsourced or not. In fact, streamlining R&D processes including outsourcing can provide returns of up to 10 to 85 cents on every dollar of R&D expenditure.

As one develops their cast of headshops and other outsource partnerships, one needs to balance their internal and external resources of skill sets, experience base, and congregate their core competencies to satisfy the need of the corporate strategic plan. Once the system is established, one needs to establish leadership practices to ensure sustainable management of these resources.

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Jun 28, 2009 | 0 comments View Post

Leading Teams to Sustainability

Were you ever a member of a team that did not work?  Were you part of the problem because you provoked or avoided conflict within the team?

Teams are constructed to provide deliverables of value to the greater organization.  They can be based on a project, product, or administer a department.  Many of us understand through our experience that the leader is ultimately responsible for the outcome of a team, yet it is the membership that should be called on to guarantee the success of the team (as in the analogy of all hands needed to keep a ship afloat). 

Establishing a team with a defined scope and purpose is a major key determinant of success.  Getting the right members on the right seats of the bus is another determinant.  Most often in practice, it is the leader who sets the direction and membership, and that direction is modified by inputs of team members.  These modifications help build cohesiveness and alignment within the team. 

However, alignment of direction should not be confused with a diversity of viewpoints.  The healthiest and most sustainable teams possess disruptive opinions that challenge ideas and viewpoints when discussed in a constructive manner.  It is the responsibility of the leader to reign in “constructive disruption”  to maintain progress toward team goals.  Sometimes, an outside influence, an HR person or team coach, is helpful to monitor team progress and to help the leader with membership and progress. 

These determinants of alignment and constructive disruption help build and maintain sustainable teams with value-added deliverables.

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May 16, 2009 | 0 comments View Post

Leadership Styles in Technical Environments

Wild MustangsMany technical environments are traditionally heirarchical in nature, so in many R&D organizations leadership styles are often the outcome of lord-serf relationships. This situation is an archetype of the academic environment from which so many technical professionals emanate. This leadership style fits well within the heirarchical corporate culture, yet how does one adapt their style to other types of cultures, namely, the market, clan, and adhocracy cultures.

Short answer: flexibility is the trait one needs best to adapt and align with other stakeholders notwithstanding the type of corporate culture, like the approach taken by Strategyn. Clan cultures are typically family owned and dominated by a single dynamic and sometimes charismatic individual who runs almost everything So in some companies, a it is best to be willing to share the limelight and credit yet simultaneously provide “push-back” toward an organizational tendency to switch research initiatives prematurely before fruition. Instead of succumbing to an opportunity du jour environment, a sturdy hand on the rudder approach wins in the long run–in the end, we all need to deliver to provide value.

Market cultures tend to be highly driven from the view of the marketing department’s needs (typically a good thing), which can quickly change from week to week or month to month, depending on the industry. For most companies with the market culture, the research agenda is set well in advance so it is helpful for sustainability to have small skunk works to augment the innovation effort. The adhocracy culture is innovation driven, so the opinion of the technical leadership looms large in the direction of such companies. Most any leadership style that is non-hierarchical can work, because the company’s progress largely depends on the pace of new deliverables.

In sum, flexibility to the particular culture and adaptability to change helps direct the leadership style that best fits with the culture and align with stakeholders.

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May 08, 2009 | 0 comments View Post

Leadership Styles in Differing Corporate Cultures

captain-planet_www-txt2pic-comLeadership and management work in concert to shape the path and then drive the organization along that path. This is just as true for innovation environments yet with the added dimension of fitting in with the corporate culture of their organization. Innovation environments are comprised of technical leadership and those relevant stakeholders in the company that enable commercialization of novel goods and/or services.

In one viewpoint, innovation environments need to adapt to the culture of the corporate host. Put this way, the technical leadership of the research department and relevant stakeholders must understand the needs of the greater organization. What type of research organization fits best into a particular type of corporate culture? To answer this, it is best to define the corporate culture that “hosts” the research organization.

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Apr 26, 2009 | 0 comments View Post
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