How can you keep your R&D team focused on innovation while meeting business objectives?

Innovation seamlessly intertwines science, business, and regulatory standards. Understanding the core requirements is crucial for it to align with business goals. Setting clear, strategic objectives ensures that scientific and commercial aspects are considered. Collaborating across different teams is essential to identify moments where science and business intersect. Starting with a small, agile team and expanding as the project grows brings varied expertise into play. This balanced approach helps organizations stay innovative while aligning with broader business aims.

It is important to encourage cross-functional collaboration internally within R&D team and also from external team members (marketing, supply chain, logistics, business etc.). Great ideas can come from any level of the associates. Setting project targets at a early stage is more important than rushing to execute tasks to meet a certain deadlines. Foster an innovative culture that rewards individuals who tries to stay up to dated with new technologies and contributes with innovative ideas.

R&D Team Innovativeness. To maintain a focus on innovation within an R&D team, it's essential to cultivate a culture that values creativity, curiosity, and risk-taking. Encourage open dialogue, embrace diverse perspectives, and allocate resources for experimentation. Set clear innovation-oriented goals aligned with the organization's strategy, and provide regular feedback to keep the team motivated. Foster cross-functional collaboration, both within the team and with external experts, to enhance creativity. By implementing these strategies, an R&D team can consistently generate groundbreaking ideas and solutions.

There are multiple means to encourage innovation in an Rand D organization. Reward innovation, reward people that truly innovate. Set challenging goals where status quo will likely not deliver an outcome. Balance process. Dedicate limited parts of RandD budget (within reason) on challenging seemingly intractable, high risk high reward projects. Projects where there is limited precedence. Encourage a culture where failure is discussed (in addition to success) to help drive learnings for future projects. Sustain a compelling vision for what success looks like

Successful innovation requires a "portfolio approach" that strategically distributes resources ($, people, time) across a range of projects. A well structured portfolio includes shorter term lower risk opportunities (that still create value for customers and the business) to higher risk, higher impract, disruptive innovations with potential for accelerating long-term growth.

When facing a problem, challenge, or unexpected situation, many employees at different management levels tend to react defensively by sharing the problem rather than seeking a solution. They fear being blamed for the situation and want to avoid hearing the dreaded remark from stakeholders, 'I was not aware/informed of this problem.' I would recommend organizations encourage a higher sense of accountability and decision ownership. This requires that organizations promote a culture of tolerance and mistake acceptance, without compromising professional responsibility, of course. Empowered & solution-oriented employees can make projects progress rapidly and efficiently.

Being obsessively focused on customers, like Amazon, allows teams to keep new innovations relevant and desirable for the customer, one of the main stakeholders. How? Seek counsel early and often on a product or project with those customers either through a VIP group who has raised their hand to support or through customer interviews and focus groups. Keeping your customer close to research and development also benefits the co-creation process. Don’t create in a bubble, having the old adage of “build and they will come”, instead seek input, recommendations and feedback in a circle of influence towards creating solutions together. Build the right solution for the RIGHT need for the main customer being affected the most by the problem.

Introducing innovation by stealth. As a Change Manager, I need to focus on delivering against the business case and meeting my KPI's, but while doing that I can nudge staff to try and later adopt new technology. For example, instead of producing PDF quick reference guides I create QR codes to lead users to a SharePoint site that houses videos on Stream. These videos have embedded Microsoft Forms that use Power Automate to crunch adoption metrics. Users have no idea they are on a journey teaching them to self-serve SharePoint and leaders will later ask "Can I have that again". Add technology while getting the job done.