Is Your R&D Department Focused on Growth, or Just Its Own Ego?

Abstract

Nearly every company has a department, division or business unit that, at least in the broadest sense, is concerned with the topic “research and development” (R&D). In fact, many companies have several different areas that work on different aspects of research and development, which hardly helps to simplify the matter. In some cases these business units are called upon to develop new products and services; in other cases they’ve simply made doing so their job, and no one has raised any objections.

As such, the first question in approaching the field of “research and development” is the following: What does R&D mean to you? After having answered this question you will learn why it is important to know how much love a new product needs and how to deal with the R&D debacle that occurs when your experts just focus on their own ego and develop nothing but themselves. In the last part of this chapter you will learn how to make your R&D unit a real innovation platform and how the triage system helps you achieving this.