We can Achieve the R&D we Need

Thank you Donald Smith for contributing to this article.

Burning Questions

What does good R&D look like?? Who is the best, and what do they do differently??

R&D people across industries have been asking me these questions a lot lately.? The conversations start with, “We can’t keep running R&D like this anymore.? We are way too analog, nothing works like it should, decisions take too long.? I’ve got to get this under control.”

They want to radically change a massive organizational process that, at its core, is a creative endeavor.? Human-led creative endeavors feed off chaos.? They must disrupt, deviate from the norm, find radical new ideas, discover the undiscovered, and design the next great thing.? Creativity and chaos are necessary to break from old patterns.? When they succeed, they call it innovation.

Large companies feel the most pain.? They have scaled R&D organically and killed agility along the way.? They sit on a mountain of intellectual property, unable to realize its maximum value.? Operational silos, data silos, and human silos are the norm.? Still, smart and capable people have made the most of these suboptimal conditions, mostly through brute force.

There is a lot to envy about smaller up-and-coming product companies.? They haven’t yet reached the “chaos-inflection-point” where bureaucratic entropy sets in.? They are digitally native and typically more willing to place bigger bets, take risks, fail fast, and keep going.? But they lack the comparative ability to scale and maximize their reach, to know from and avoid past mistakes, to navigate complex regulations, and to attract talent with their smaller brand power.

Larger companies are not going to trade their scale and assets to function like smaller competitors.? They need to balance constructive chaos with the right amount of order.?

What could this look like?

The answer lies at the intersection of the company’s mission, R&D’s vision, and R&D’s guiding principles. ?Together they form the basis for what I call the R&D meta-process (RDMP), a model for behavior and predictability that is inevitably unique for each organization.? It dictates that both new products and innovative variations of existing products deserve their own properly tuned and optimized path through the R&D lifecycle.? Those distinct pathways are based on a multitude of variables:? product type, formulation complexity, novelty, risk profile, cost implications, market urgency, in-silico capabilities, and so on.? The RDMP dictates how these variables are applied and result in an R&D engine that is truly cross-functional and personalized for the product.

What has stopped companies from layering in this worthwhile complexity over the years?? R&D organizations have long lacked the tools to automate and the ability to leverage data to know how to adjust.? Now the secret sauce starts to emerge: your unique R&D meta-process, powered by digital capabilities and data, enables cross-functional performance and makes R&D excellence possible.

That means digitally transforming R&D is just as much about process reinvention as it is about new digital capabilities.? We can finally have flexibility by design informed by 360-degree data.? We can digitally spoon out the right amount of process, elasticity, predictability, and structure for each product’s R&D lifecycle.

What does good look like? ?Look inward.? R&D excellence will reflect your own unique strategy, and its orderly execution will be digitally tuned to the needs of your patients, customers, and consumers.