2013

Innovation is Changing Pre-Product Development R&D [Machine Design – September 5, 2013], discusses the some of the changes that are occurring in advanced research and development stemming from industry’s decade-long focus on innovation.

Our 2008 North American study on Organic Innovation indicated that industry leaders and early adopters were actively focusing on improving pre-product development activities. Our 2013 study more deeply investigated these findings.  We focused on the types, purposes, usage, and changing importance of research, advanced development, and product development processes.  Two-hundred companies from the USA, Canada, and Mexico participated in numbers that represent the relative R&D spending of the North American countries.  The findings discussed here emanate from participant responses on their approaches to Organic Innovation, one of the five topic areas in our research.

The 2013 findings affirm a ten year trend.  Most companies now have multiple, approaching “numerous,” specifically-purposed processes.  Design engineers, program managers, and organizational leaders are likely seeing an increase in the processes used to guide research and/or product development on a wide scale. There is a new wave of them the past five to ten years years.  This is spurred by the need for western companies to improve their overall innovation levels, and their consistency of execution to these higher levels, to improve their global competitive position. These new processes are starting to enter the second quartile of industry penetration. Processes that precede product development are increasing notably. The number of variations and flavors of “mainstream” product development processes are also increasing, but at a lesser rate.

For pre-product development processes, the change is pronounced. Over the past five years, there has been a tripling in formal Basic Research processes and a near quadrupling of formal Applied Research processes. Advanced Development processes have risen 30%. A number of companies have “combination processes” used across several categories and those numbers have also risen.

The change is not as pronounced for Product Development processes. In 2008, 76% of companies had one or two processes to guide development projects. Forty percent of companies used one process and 36% used two. This year, companies running with a single process decreased to 35% as companies added more processes. Most notably, the number of North American companies using four or more processes nearly doubled.

More R&D or just more processes? [Machine Design – December 12, 2013], shares additional findings from the 2013 initiative and offers insight as to what is happening on a macro scale to industry’s next generation set of product development and innovation processes.

The name of this post is the title of a primary research project that GGI has been quietly, or maybe not so quietly, conducting. There are 31 questions. It takes 30-35 minutes according to our beta test of thirty companies. We are not seeking anything confidential, all beta companies agreed. To be sure though, your responses will be 100% confidential.

Until the writing of this blog, there have been no web postings except in the research portal on GGI’s web site. We have been conducting the research by phone or in person; and there was a limited email sent out by us. To best randomize our sample, enabling even more confidence in Margin of Error calculations, several companies have also graciously sponsored controlled samples to companies in their network.

Since 1998 GGI has done statistically valid primary research every few years. Our 2008 research on “CXO Corporate Metrics Practices” is still the best information available for R&D-Product Development on the web, look for Business Week or Industry Week TOP 10 R&D Metrics. McKinsey, BCG, Booz, Kearney, ADL, Accenture and others do research metrics, but GGI has a fifteen-year body-of-knowledge on R&D and Product Development metrics that is hard to beat. Several of these consultancies have purchased our several thousand dollar research report over the years, the same report you will receive to show our appreciation for a half hour of your time. The report will come in pdf format with a “corporate license” to post it on your company intranet for all employees to reference.

Each research effort since 1998 contains five sections. The first four sections investigate strategic and tactical “things” we see leading companies testing out that are not yet generally adopted by industry. The goal is to try to see what is going to become mainstream in the coming years. We have a pretty good batting average if you look at prior GGI research topics. Without asking anything confidential, we are going to inquire about:

1) R&D Operating Environment
2) Organic Innovation
3) Open Innovation
4) Intellectual Property

The last section is always to determine the R&D-Product Development Metrics that have the greatest current industry usage and penetration. We research only the metrics, “corporate metrics,” that are of possible interest to the CEO to maximize the company’s investment in R&D, Engineering, and Product Development-Commercialization. There are 101 metrics in this questionnaire. Simply check off the ones that your company uses.

5) CXO Corporate Metrics Practices

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Not everyone can participate. We apologize. We are going to qualify the appropriateness of your company before distributing the research questionnaire and/or URL to you. The company must develop new products; and have staff and operations in the US, Canada, or Mexico. It must have $20 million in revenues at minimum; there is no upper revenue limit. It matters not if the parent or headquarters of the company is US or outside the US. Product development in North America is the focus. Finally, the address and domain name of your correspondence with us must be the same as your company, no gmail or other generic domains please. Confidentiality cannot be otherwise assured. These are easy hurdles for most we hope are reading this blog.

If you are interested, or know a colleague that might be, please contact us through the link we have set up for folks that might wish to “opt in” to this research project.

My company qualifies, I’d like to opt in.

We are nearing the end of our research effort and ask that you submit a completed questionnaire by September 30, 2013 please.