Innovate or Perish: Managing the Enduring Technology Company in the Global Market

Moving R&D into Accountability

We see what is driving the new interest in innovation: intense competitive pressure, which immediately translates into pressure to extract additional value. And value is cast in terms alien to many research organizations, but quite familiar to most business functions: investment and returns. Bringing innovation into the return on investment (ROI) part of the business equation is a good thing. Innovation has perhaps begun to atrophy and languish in the land of sunk costs, and given today’s competitive pressures and limited R&D budgets, there seems little alternative to moving R&D further into accountability.

In this kind of an environment, research functions become R&D organisms, which have to sustain themselves as such, and are unique in that virtually every element of the innovation food chain is open to them and increasingly required of them. So research organizations can no longer afford to live in the isolated (or, perhaps insulated) world we have come to expect, but in reality theirs is more of a hybrid world, where all things are possible and sometimes even necessary. Much of what we read in the press, and much of what companies are now furiously engaged in doing with their innovation assets involves value extraction. The pressure to extract value is clear and palpable. Rising to that challenge means recognizing the need to operate with equal facility in multiple domains and be accountable for that activity in order to be successful.

Yet there ...