You're in charge of R&D. How can you maximize the benefits of strategic thinking?

To maximize the benefits of strategic thinking in R&D, it's essential to foster a culture that encourages innovation and long-term planning. This involves aligning R&D goals with overall business objectives, regularly evaluating market trends and competitive landscapes, and prioritizing projects with high potential for impact. Additionally, creating cross-functional teams fosters diverse perspectives and enhances problem-solving capabilities. Continuous learning and adaptation are crucial to staying agile and responsive to changing circumstances, ensuring that strategic thinking remains dynamic and effective in driving growth and innovation.

The research and development area aligned with the company's strategic planning can generate great avenues of value. Many R&D projects are explored in horizons 2 and 3, where we do not have a database, solutions that need more study and that have their risk.. so it is important that it is aligned with the strategic planning.

Tener un objetivo tangible y un fin es el primer paso. Después habrá que crear toda al estructura que permita llegar a esa idea en común. Establecer la ruta a seguir será más fácil

As the head of R&D, I start by defining a clear vision for my team. This includes our purpose, goals, and values. This vision guides our work and helps us communicate effectively with our team and stakeholders. It also ensures that our R&D efforts align with the organization's overall strategy and prioritize valuable opportunities. By thinking strategically, we can focus our efforts on impactful innovation.

To maximize strategic thinking in R&D, I'd start by assessing our team's strengths and weaknesses. Our strengths lie in diverse expertise, collaborative culture, and access to resources. However, weaknesses such as communication gaps, risk aversion, time constraints, and external dependencies hinder our potential. To leverage strategic thinking, we must set clear goals, foster cross-functional collaboration, invest in continuous learning, manage risks effectively, adopt an agile approach, and establish metrics for feedback and improvement. Addressing these areas will empower us to innovate efficiently and achieve our long-term objectives.

To implement actions, a formal business plan at R&D unit level may be very useful which can define key targets, key tasks, actions with timelines, outcomes and owner. A periodic review with the core team on implementation of business plan will help in removing hurdles in executing the plan.

As an R&D leader, we have two main responsibilities: 1. How can we complete the current development project on time? How can it contribute to the success of next product or service that is getting to the market? 2. How to start new projects? How do we conduct good market research followed by our domain (engg, medical) research before we start solution development? The first one is relatively shorter term and good execution strategy is a must. The latter one starts ab initio and a longer term project where visioning and domain excellence become of essence. As R&D leader, a good mix of R and D are required for immediate as well as continued success.