Key Points

• R&D is one of the most critical components of a company that differentiates it from others.
• Sharpening R&D’s focus can save money while also creating a stronger, cross-functional team that moves in the same direction.
• The hope is that by cutting unnecessary R&D, a company will save money and get ahead of its competitors.

It should go without saying that in the grand scheme of corporate life, whether your business is big or small, innovation can be your lifeblood. Whether it’s standing out from the competition or continuing to innovate on a product customers already love, there is so much to be said about consistently coming up with big new ideas.

The challenge for many businesses, again, is that this innovation often yields more failures than successes. The good news is that failure can usually lead to the right ideas, but with every failure, the correct result takes longer and longer to achieve, thereby driving forward the idea that R&D needs to move faster.

What Is R&D Strategy?

In so many words, a company wants a clear R&D strategy to create a framework for focusing innovation efforts on a series of well-defined business objectives. By focusing on only a finite number of objectives, an organization can help ensure it is working on the right problems and solutions, allocate resources efficiently, and ensure that the work being done in R&D is directly tied to what matters to both the bottom line and customers.

Rest assured that the heart of an R&D strategy is that there is an outline that highlights the organization’s priorities, the kind of technology they are betting on, and what investment levels are necessary to achieve their goals. Individual projects remain important, but the hope is that there is a broad strategy that allows all of the R&D work being done to help establish any company as a differentiator in its field.

As far as what R&D strategy is, the answer is as straightforward as you can make it. Imagine you have a blueprint that shows exactly how research and development can directly tie to a measurable business value, like profits or increased customer satisfaction. This is what R&D strategy is, as it allows a company to take the time to research and develop ideas, hardware, software, and anything else you can imagine that will improve the bottom line and the customer experience.

What Is Sharpening R&D Focus?

Now that you can dig a little deeper into the whole R&D focus idea, you can turn attention to what is sharpening R&D focus. This takes R&D to a different level, in that it wants you to take the innovation engine that already exists and prioritize high-impact projects. In other words, cut out anything that doesn’t matter right now and only focus on the things that are going to truly help your company break through some barrier that exists in the field right now.

Sharpening your R&D focus isn’t about doing more, but doing the right things smarter. This is heavily rooted in Lean principles and Agile methodology, and it’s something we’ve seen at brands like Google and 3M repeatedly. These companies quickly realized that scattered R&D teams lead to slow wins and wasted talent. You could consider this as tuning a laser in that a broad beam is wasting energy, while a focused burst can cut through something a lot faster.

Unfortunately, part of any effort to sharpen R&D is going to mean that you have to prioritize what is important, what gets paused, and what gets killed. Someone might rightfully think this is about micromanaging, but that’s not the right approach, as it’s more about chasing moonshots without having to worry about bureaucracy holding down ideas. This is exactly how Google created Gmail, which was just an experiment a Googler did in their spare time, and it’s now turned into one of the largest email services on the planet.

Tech moves and evolves overnight, so by sharpening R&D focus, you are hoping to slash your go-to-market strategy by a large percentage. The goal here is obvious, as you want to outpace your competitors and boost revenue.

Sharpening R&D Focus and Faster Breakthroughs

It’s an unfortunate truth that too many of us have watched or been part of a brilliant idea that didn’t come to life because it got caught up in R&D deck shuffling. The goal with sharpening focus is that the match here can light the fuse that is breakthroughs, and make sure that resources are directed toward the high-potential projects, and help put up blockers against distractions.

It’s a crude example, but think of sharpening R&D focus like going from a shotgun with scattershot to a high-powered sniper rifle. You will be vastly more precise (think accurate) with the latter.

This is a clear way to shorten product cycles, as in the ways Pfizer has brought and accelerated bringing vaccine development to market amid crises. Data analytics and human creativity can come together for more agile R&D projects, with the result being that everyone is moving faster and smarter toward breakthroughs that will tick.

The real benefit might ultimately be a culture that teaches you that failure is a lesson worth learning and that failure isn’t taboo. Bold experiments often fail time and time again before the game-changing idea finally takes place, and there are far too many examples of this being true.

Understanding R&D Challenges

As much as everyone wants to scream from the rooftops about new and exciting R&D projects, this is also a field that can very much feel like the wild west of whiteboards. Ideas are scribbled everywhere around a room, and in too many instances, teammates aren’t talking to each other. Rest assured that while the shiny object might have plenty of glitter, it also has to compete for attention against other high-priority projects.

It’s hard to quantify exactly how many projects don’t deliver in R&D fields, but if you said 70%, it would likely be a hard number to argue against and might even be too safe. In other words, if creativity gets stifled or if teams aren’t chasing the right goals, or even if the ROI isn’t super clear, you might wind up in a position where competitors are lapping you on the innovation side because your R&D isn’t sharpened.

How Sharpening R&D Focus Accelerates Breakthroughs

Prioritize High-Impact Projects

Among the different ways you can sharpen your R&D focus to move faster on breakthroughs is to understandably prioritize high-impact projects. You have to start killing anything that doesn’t have a direct tie to the market right now or the strategic alignment of the business today.

There is a time and place to think about the future, but sharpening R&D focus starts with the here and now, or only using 10% of R&D for transformational projects. This is basically like opening the Spotify app and trying to curate an outstanding playlist, as some of the music you like might not make the cut. There also might be a few songs on your list that are out of the norm, but they are there because they make you feel something.

You’ll feel successful when you have a slate of R&D projects that are 80% high-impact, which will make any organization feel like they are spending properly.

Fostering Cross-Functional Collaboration

One of the biggest things that can kill any R&D project, no matter how high-impact or not, is if teams are not talking to one another. Breaking down silos with diverse teams is going to be critical for success, right from the first day of any new project. These teams should have joint milestones, and it doesn’t matter if it’s an engineer or marketer; everyone should be held to the same standards.

Leveraging Agile Methodologies

Tied directly back to the crux of a lot of the work we do, there is a direct opportunity to leverage Agile methodologies within the scope of sharpening an R&D focus. Adopting Agile sprints for R&D is a great way to look at short cycles of build-test-learn to see if the work you are doing has any real velocity to move forward.

If you use the Agile method, it’s going to help expose where bottlenecks exist, which in turn leads to faster validation of something new and reduces the costs of sinking more into it if the reality is that it won’t work at all.

Data-Driven Decision Making

If you combine a sharpened R&D focus with data-based decision-making, you can look at how to make better choices on allocating resources. This includes, but is certainly not limited to, using predictive models to forecast the future potential of projects.

While R&D certainly relies on a bit of gut-based decision-making, this is wrong as often as it is right. This isn’t true for using data, which is far more likely to make for a smarter bet on what’s next.

Benefits of a Sharpened R&D Focus

It should be pretty evident at this point, but the benefits of a sharpened R&D focus are very clear. Not only does it turbocharge breakthroughs, but it can also slash overall R&D costs by reducing the total number of projects. This allows the right amount of resources to be allocated to projects that have a real chance of being differentiators in the future for a business.

Better yet, teams can deliver more with less, and ultimately, morale is going to jump as a result. Teams that are able to take bold risks, all while removing a lot of the frustration that leads to taking these risks, are going to wind up producing more winners than not. Add in cross-collaboration as another benefit, and you have fewer false starts and more market wins.

Other Useful Tools and Concepts

At the end of the day, there is a ton that can be learned about all of the benefits of R&D. Of course, this doesn’t mean that R&D is the only topic to consider reading more about. You might also want to consider the benefits of Value Stream Mapping for service operations, which can be applied in an R&D context to eliminate unnecessary steps in review processes.

Alternatively, you could also take a look at how to close the loop on how Kaizen enhances feedback systems. Feedback is going to be a critical component of how successful your R&D results are with customers, so this is a great thing to familiarize yourself with. Lastly, take a look at how engaging people in your continuous improvement efforts will play off, which is something everyone in business should know.

Conclusion

Ultimately, sharpening your R&D focus isn’t something that should be optional, but mandatory. It’s going to be necessary to perform these actions to accelerate your team’s ability to break through whatever might be currently stopping them from delivering something great. The hope is that your business can outrun your rivals with speed and smarts, something that R&D can definitely deliver again and again.