Research

The 54th R&D 100 Awards & Technology Conference is coming right up, November 2-4.  The conference, now in its second year, will open at noon on Wednesday and continue through noon on Friday.  The Awards Dinner, where 275 Finalists are now eagerly waiting to see if they will be one of the 100 Winners this year, will be Thursday evening November 3.

Last year, at the inaugural conference, we enjoyed great learning from top scientists, engineers, managers, and thought leaders from all over the globe – and a bit of fun at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.  Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway, and the other keynote speakers participated in the conference as colleagues from beginning to end. R&D Magazine did a great job inventing a concurrent conference that complimented their renowned R&D 100 Awards. I was pleased to be invited to present at this first annual conference.  My talk was on “R&D Complexity Increases In the Decade Ahead,” the areas that will keep us on our toes from increasing complexity.

This year’s conference will be held just south of Washington, DC.  R&D Magazine guessed the place would be hopping a week before the presidential election and they were right.  It should be great fun again.  I am pleased to be invited back for the second annual conference, this time to talk on two different subjects.

10 Techniques to Achieve Breakthroughs Through Innovation

Earlier this year, GGI researched disruptive, radical, and breakthrough innovation.  2015 marked the 20th anniversary of Christensen’s work on disruptive innovation. It was time to take a snapshot of how the body of knowledge had evolved over two decades.

Our work found ten distinct breakthrough strategies.  They vary greatly, from competing on business-models to specific market or business strategies to technology mastery to commercialization execution.  There is no common root to them, except that your company and industry will know they are experiencing a breakthrough from a new or a changing basis of competition.

12 Trends in the Science of Managing R&D and Product Development

After my presentation last year on Complexity, R&D Magazine asked me to build off it and to make recommendations on how to manage in the decade ahead.  I presented this work for the first time at a conference in Poland in April of this year.  Subsequently, some areas have been refined and shored up.

Directing and overseeing science, materials, technology, software creation-to-commercialization activities is already a good bit more challenging this past decade.  Well, not to disappoint, we have another tumultuous decade to go.  There will be another reset around 2025, once there are 100 billion connected devices and that becomes the new normal.

Pleasant Surprise At The 2015 Conference Last Year

At the 2015 R&D 100 Awards Dinner last year at Caesars Palace some eight or ten different people, that had participated in either GGI’s Innovation or Metrics Summits or had been our clients, walked the red carpet to receive their individual or team member R&D 100 Award.

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Please Don’t Forget

GGI’s 20th Metrics Summit is October 18-20

A quick note to let you know that our 20th R&D-Product Development Metrics Summit is coming up, October 18-20 in Norwood, MA.

Our conference facility is equidistant between the Providence and Boston airports, and a comprehensive renovation has just been completed.

The place is beautiful and the food is great.

Content is stimulating, and our Summit discussions and Workshop are great fun too.

Please join us.

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Recent Twitter Postings on Innovation & Metrics

GGI has become significantly more active on Twitter in 2016.

No chit chat.

GGI Tweets content from our primary and secondary research and publications; and about GGI events and presentations.

There are a number of substantive Tweets that went out October 7-9 regarding our recent work and near term plans.

A quick look.

@GoldenseGroup

 Please consider Following GGI on Twitter.

Last year, 2015, marked the twentieth anniversary of disruptive innovation – introduced to the world by Clayton Christensen in 1995.  Over the past two decades, many companies and makers have targeted the creation of new-to-the-world products.  This has resulted in a number of approaches that are all disruptive in their own way.  At this time, nine different techniques for achieving breakthrough innovation exist.

GGI performed secondary research to identify these nine techniques.  Our scan covered a number of notable periodicals including:  Harvard’s Harvard Business Review, The Economist’s Chief Financial Officer, MIT’s  Sloan Management Review, IRI’s Research & Technology Management, IEEE’s Engineering Management Review, IEEE’s Transactions on Engineering Management, ASEM’s Engineering Management Journal, PDMA’s Journal of Product Innovation Management,  PWC’s [formerly Booz’s] Strategy+Business, and other publications.

Breakthrough Innovation: Nine Techniques [Machine Design – May 2016] gives a one paragraph description of each technique and provides active links to selected sources and writings for the reader to explore.

When a company’s innovation levels are high, or a company’s innovation levels are low and not recognized as being low, GGI has suggested that our clients and customers enter into an award contest.  In the former case, a win creates lovely price premium and brand value opportunities for several years.  In the latter case, competing can be calibrating to both management and to the members the cross-functional product development community.  Benchmarking company products provides learning opportunities up and down the ladder.

There are many award competitions around the globe each year.  Regardless of the purpose or the type of award, there are none as prestigious as the annual R&D 100 Awards – excepting possibly a Nobel Prize.  The R&D 100 Awards are now produced by Advantage Business Media [ABM].  ABM has become one of the publishing powerhouses in the scientific and engineering community with a portfolio of some twenty-five trade publications across the fields of communications, design, manufacturing, and science.  R&D Magazine is among its most prized assets and is the originator and long-time home of the R&D 100 Awards.

As a subscriber to R&D Magazine since the early 1990s, I had followed the results most years and of course when GGI’s clients competed.  But, I had never been to the actual awards ceremony.  The bottom line is that everyone should go to the R&D 100 Awards Dinner at least once in their career.

New Twists For The 2015 R&D 100 Awards

Two things were different this year.  First, ABM decided to produce a two-day conference preceding the Awards banquet on Friday evening.  The 1st Annual R&D Technology Conference had four tracks and attracted over two hundred registrants.   Tim Studt, R&D Magazine’s renowned editor of several decades and the chief architect of the R&D 100 Awards and annual R&D Funding Forecast, asked me to speak on how the complexity of managing R&D will increase in the next decade.

The second thing that was different, was that for the first time in 53 years since the awards began, the winners were not announced in advance.  You may imagine that there were a good number of people bursting with anticipation throughout the conference and right up to the end of the Awards banquet Friday evening at 10:30 PM.

A black tie event, the Awards banquet did not disappoint.  Held at beautiful Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, guests were first surprised by the entrance to the ball room.  There was immediate curiosity as to what might await as one passed through the gateway.

As I mentioned, the R&D 100 Award winners were not announced in advance.  After a nice dinner, the lights went out and on came the spotlights.  ABM had orchestrated the event to the level of the Emmy Awards.  There were spotlight instructions identifying where every winner sat at every table in sequential order; for all 100 winners and for the approximately twenty five extra awards that were presented that evening.  The only thing missing was the TV cameras.

Tim Studt and Bea Riemschneider hosted the evening.  Bea is the Editorial Director of Advantage’s Science Group. The Science Group includes R&D Magazine and ten other science and medical publications.

The 2015 R&D 100 Award Winners – Highlights

The largest group of winners were the United States National Laboratories and NASA.  Collectively, they took home over thirty awards and were listed as contributors to a dozen more companies that won.  A number of these awards, notably from Oak Ridge National Laboratories, were for advances in 3D printing technology.

The next big block of winners came from companies who all shared the word “Dow” in their names.  “Dow companies” took home seven awards.

The third big block, consisting of four awards, was from Taiwan ROC’s Industrial Technology Research Group [ITRG].  One of these awards will be seen shortly in all our fire departments.  ITRG created an impeller that goes in line before a fire hose’s nozzle and spins with the flow of water.  The spin generates electricity which is captured to power a new spotlight attached to the nozzle.  Whenever the hose is used, the light shines on the target.

From memory, I think Tim said from the podium that the winners came from twenty countries.  Some of the more recognizable winning companies included: Waters, Millipore, Ethicon, Thermo Electron, Milliken, Agilent, Qualcomm, IBM, Boston Scientific, Adelphi, MSC, Mitsubshi, Toyota, and Shimazdu.

Several universities also won awards. Another possible game-changing product came from the University of Central Florida.  They have patented an electrical power transmission cable that transmits power, that also has an outer concentric cable that acts as a battery to store power.  The power cable and the battery are one unit.  There are implications for many industries.

Finally, and please pardon me for this, but I counted roughly twenty companies as the night proceeded that had participated in GGI’s Innovation or Metrics Summits some time in the past 5-8 years.  My thought was that many of these innovation-hungry companies must do a methodical assessment of what was available to be learned on the subject as part of their effort to innovate.  GGI’s next Summit is December 8-10, 2015, the 13th R&D-Product Development Innovation Summit.

The 2015 R&D 100 Award Winners – List

Lindsay Hock, Editor of Product Design & Development Magazine [PD&D], published the list of the 2015 winners on November 18.

2015 R&D 100 Award Winners

The 2015 Inaugural Technology Conference – Summary

Bea Riemschneider, Editorial Director for ABM’s Science Group, published an article on November 19 that summarizes the first annual science and technology conference.

R&D Industry Leaders Explore the Innovation Process at Inaugural Science and Technology Conference

NEEDHAM, Mass. — (BUSINESS WIRE) — February 23, 2015 — Corporate demand for specific strategies, tactics, techniques, tools, and software to bolster Corporate Innovation have steadily increased for fifteen years.

As corporate demand grew, large think tanks and research firms studied what was working. Solutions providers, Makers, and service firms entered the market as money could be made. Like all emergent markets, many initial offerings had a high fall out rate. While still the case, certain approaches are producing financial results and initial patterns of success are apparent.

Intellectual Property [IP] strategy and management, both by itself and aided by the pull from increasing levels of corporate innovation, has also matured. Starting a few years earlier than innovation, circa the technology boom of the 1990s, companies sought to trade, barter, license, purchase, and sell IP at greater levels than any prior time in history. As the IP market grew, suppliers emerged to meet the increased demand.

Successful IP enablers are also beginning to sort themselves out. Corporate abilities to identify, value, and transact IP will soon approach corporate abilities to identify, price, and sell winning products.

The R&D-Product Development Innovation Summit, last held in 2012, offers an update on the evolution of the Corporate Innovation and IP bodies of knowledge. Much changed during the Great Recession. Companies really had to focus to generate good business results in an increasingly normalized, globalized, and economically challenged competitive landscape.

This fact driven and data intensive event, targeted to CXOs and corporate leaders, draws on findings from over fifty secondary research sources along with primary research sources on both subjects.  GGI’s sixth industry study since 1998, found notable shifts in the strategic management of R&D and in processes for Organic Innovation.  Open Innovation is on the rise.  Patent and Trade Secret practices are changing.  The ability to determine the value of, and then to monetize IP, is maturing.  And, the metrics corporations use to measure R&D and IP output and productivity are now primarily focused on business results.

Produced in conjunction with The Management Roundtable of Waltham, MA, this Summit holds the content to empower executives with the state-of-the-state knowledge needed to lead innovation and IP improvements in their companies.

With many more companies allocating a small part of their R&D budget to take on riskier projects, and the growth in corporate infrastructure to manage these riskier activities [Machine Design – July 17, 2014], the lines are starting to blur between two terms that historically were well differentiated. New products are now being launched out of “innovation organizations” and “advanced development organizations,” and not just product development organizations. As of now, research organizations are not yet launching products to market.

Due to a combination of the changing corporate approaches described above, the desires of developers to bring solution to markets and not just a piece of a solution, the globalization of R&D that has decentralized R&D, and naming conventions for product organizations that differ by country, one can no longer just pay attention to product development pipelines to stay abreast of what might be coming to market. The jury is still out as to whether today’s approaches will prove more productive than historical approaches that restricted the scope of projects to reduce uncertainty and improve forecastability of key enabling features and technologies – and then turned these enablers over to product development.

Research and development is a continuum, and highly analog rather than digital in construct (Figure 1). Historically, R&D could generally be segmented into four categories: Basic Research, Applied Research, Advanced Development, and Product Development. “Skunk Works” is perhaps a fifth category, a discussion for another day.

 Figure 1

The Continuum™ of Research and Development

What’s The Difference Between Research and Development? [Machine Design – October 9, 2014] discusses historical approaches and the evolving corporate practices taking place today.

Note:  The URL for the October 9 Machine Design issue will not be active for a few more weeks, but the article is posted.

The era of corporate innovation began roughly fifteen years ago, started by industry leaders in the mid-1990s with successful targeted disruptive innovations and chasm crossings.  Today, most companies have now tried out many new approaches and at least changed some of their historical innovation practices to lead, compete, or to just keep up.

John Stark, noted author on the subjects of Product Data Management and Product Lifecycle Management and Director of John Stark Associates which is a research and consulting firm based in Switzerland, has collaborated with GGI on various projects for the better part of the past thirty years.  John Stark Associates publishes a bi-monthly newsletter entitled the “2PLM e-zine” that focuses on the subjects and issues of importance to product development and lifecycle management professionals.  Each time GGI publishes the results of our primary research studies, John Stark runs a six-part series in the 2PLM e-zine.

The first article of the six is a general announcement to the 2PLM readership that alerts them to the upcoming five content pieces.  This first 2PLM article was published yesterday July 7, 2014.  The remaining articles will occur over the next two and one-half months as each bi-monthly issue is published.

The GGI study, entitled the “2014 Product Development Metrics Survey”, was conducted by sending questionnaires to a wide range of companies developing products throughout North America. Participating companies had headquarters throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia, but their response was for North American R&D-Product Development operations. Complete data sets were received from 200 companies. Consumer, industrial, medical, chemical, and automotive/vehicular products were the top respondent industries. Participants completed 31 questions detailing their demographic information and practices in the following five research areas: R&D Operating Environment, Organic Innovation, Open Innovation, Intellectual Property, and the Top Corporate Metrics used to measure R&D and Product Development. The research period was September 2012 to October 2013. The results were published March 3, 2014. This research is statistically valid and provides a Margin Of Error for each research question.

The pages at which 2PLM is published are:

Current Issue

Main 2PLM Portal

This Summit will provide participants with a comprehensive look at the Innovation Body of Knowledge for product strategy, marketing, R&D, development, and commercialization functions.  There will be an emphasis on top management enablers and techniques to create and embed systematic corporate innovation.  Primary and secondary industry research on innovation and measurement tools, techniques, and metrics are used throughout the Summit.

Our first goal will be to codify the current management science of innovation in corporations for our participants.  The Summit will synthesize both what is known and what actually works in companies.  Our approach will be as factual and quantitative as possible for the subject matter.  We constantly refresh the Summit and its Coursebook.  There will be four interactive exercises so everyone samples some key techniques they might some day oversee that will be lead by GGI staff and several guest speakers.

Our second goal will be to take a look at the likely corporate innovation knowledge, capabilities, and changes in the coming decade.  Organizations will evolve to accommodate IP, as they did with globalization and supply-chain.  Business processes will change as early-stage inventions are increasingly transacted in dedicated markets before they are commercialized.  Functions that define and create products will have a “make vs. sell” decision at every step of the way, a change analogous to the introduction of simulation tools to their practices.

Our third goal will be to alert you to categories of tools and systems that will enter the work place.  When “industry demanded better innovation” back around 2004 it created a market for it.  Suppliers to this new product category got busy.  Thought leaders saw it coming in the late 1990s, so some had a running start.  Well, after ten years now, a number of tools, techniques and technologies are withstanding the test of time.  Constantly improving research exists on the ones to think more seriously about.  Little is mainstream yet, but what to do or try and and what not to do or try is becoming clearer.

At the conclusion of the Summit, participants will be current with industry management science and will have a glimpse of the future. Professionals wishing to put themselves and their fellow company leaders in a better position to lead, nurture, stimulate, and drive innovation and invention should consider this venue.  Numerous participants have said, “GGI’s Summit is an Executive MBA on the subject of Innovation.”

Finally, and this is not true of all GGI Metrics Summits, GGI published our 6th North American study of R&D and Product Development practices in the areas of R&D Operating Environments, Organic Innovation, Open Innovation, Intellectual Property, and the Top Corporate R&D Metrics In Use on March 3, 2014. Two-hundred companies from the USA, Canada, and Mexico participated in numbers that represent the relative R&D spending of the North American countries. It will be difficult to find information that is more current to augment the practical nature and usable outcomes of this 12th Innovation Summit.

Please visit our Summit web site for additional content and registration information.

Organic Innovation, Open Innovation, Intellectual Property, & CXO Corporate Metrics Practices, July 23, 2013, describes primary research that GGI was conducting in 2013.  We have now concluded the research period and are currently analyzing the results.  Here we address a piece of what we found on the subject of Open Innovation [OI].

Product developers have been practicing “make vs. buy” analysis for decades.   Typically, the focus is on  whether to outsource the manufacture of components or subassemblies that have already been designed and developed in-house.  Since the early 2000s and the publishing of “Open Business Models:  How to Thrive in the New Innovation Economy” by Henry Chesborough, the make vs. buy considerations have been moving upstream into design and development activities.  This is what industry now refers to as “Open Innovation [OI].”  Should our company invent a needed new product feature or capability, or has another company already done it?  Can we acquire it or license it if something already exists that meets our needs?  Is partnering or allying with the company our best alternative if what they have is close but does not exactly (yet) meet our needs?  Or, should we put the investment in and incur the likely time-to-market penalty for doing it all ourselves from scratch?  What is the best way to achieve our design intent?

Many companies are beginning to wade into the waters of OI.  Clearly there are mixed results across industries in this early market.  Only Procter & Gamble has publically touted their financial successes via more open approaches.  As of now, the infrastructure within companies enabling scientists and engineers to quickly locate appropriate alliances or find ready to go plug and play solutions is still in the nascent stages. The train is on the tracks however.

Like any new market opportunity, demand has to reach a certain level before suppliers invest to develop a solution.  And, like any new market, different suppliers will offer different solutions.  For OI, the evolving offerings range from making it easier to access university-based research and prototyping to bartering intermediaries to outright brokers who attempt to put buyers and sellers of solutions together.

The OI categories that our research focused on are:

• Crowdcasting/Crowdsourcing
• Scouting Firms
• Venture Capital and Entrepreneur Forums
• Innovation Intermediary Firms
• Private Industry Consortia Groups
• Private Industry Business Portals
• Targeted Proprietary Networks
• University Contract Agreements
• Supplier Co-Development
• Non-Competitor Joint Ventures
• Competitor Joint Ventures
• Intellectual Property Auctions
• Focused IP Search/Purchase/License

Certainly the number of different OI approaches will grow over time.  As well, some of the current categories will become more refined and be described as similar but differentiable approaches in the future.  For instance, “Innovation Intermediary Firms” will likely evolve to those that specialize in identifying companies with components that already have part numbers versus identifying companies that just have intellectual property rights but have not yet developed part numbered components.  Boutique intermediaries may specialize in one area and full service intermediaries will eventually provide one stop shopping.

What is for sure is that the demand for OI has achieved critical mass over the past decade and a new industry to service this demand is actively developing.  The advent of social media was not without resistance.  It had to overcome inculturated values dating back to the Pony Express in the 1800s.  NIH also has deeply seated values, but these too will be overcome in the years ahead.

R U an Open Innovator [Machine Design – March 6, 2014], summarizes selected findings in the area of Open Innovation from GGI’s 2013 primary research initiative.  GGi’s final report containing our complete findings is soon to be available.

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.