R&D

According to the latest research of Harvard Business Review, it was found that when a company adopted advanced technologies that were outgrown from its Research and Development efforts, the drilling cost dropped by 15%, resulting in savings of about US$ 90 million annually. Despite a strong investment in the innovation, the research found that the company faced hardships to gain traction internally for new technologies that were developed by its R&D teams. The HBR found a few of the strategies that can help overcome these hardships. Let’s know what they are in this article.

Users First 

Most of the companies take a top-down approach, developing new technologies based on high-level strategic and financial points and then they pass on those tools downwards towards the subsidiaries and teams. Though this method can be beneficial, the frontline engineers tasked with implementing it have been reluctant to follow the R&D instructions on how to do their jobs. To surpass this issue, the bottom-up approach was very effective. 

The vital key factor here was the new technology, as adapting to these technologies is not easy and so project engineers had to run a series of experiments to fix a solution about their specific site. If the people on the ground level are not excited for implementing then there will be a lot of excuses and delays in the implementation. But when they are on board, they are likely to embrace the challenges to excel. Hence it is necessary for R&D teams to engage with people who can come up with solutions.

Select Early Adopters 

To attain success it is preliminary that R&D teams need to identify users who are more receptive to specific advanced or new technologies. If the R&D team develops a digital version of a prominent analog control system, it might begin with the operational group that had headed the old system as those have a good context to understand the benefits of the update. The company that the HBR studied had also implemented two different programs to connect R&D teams with the most pertinent field engineers. At first, the company identified engineers with both operational and research experience and also made sure of having R&D teams update those engineers on the recent developments relevant to the areas of research. And secondly, the company set up an R&D outpost that allowed researchers to rotate through various diverse units, where they can understand the field engineers and at the same time promote new technologies according to the current operational needs.

Surpass Money Barrier 

Most of the companies fail to adopt the new technologies due to a lack of financial capital. But these barriers are not unconquerable. There can be many new creative ways of coming up with the resources it can be through grants, internal incubators, or external funding. The other effective way can also be bringing together projects of different sizes. Sometimes R&D teams might be eager to get technological advancements in a big project, but the managers for such projects were unlikely to agree to take on so much additional risk. To solve this the R&D team would find a small project and get the big project to fund the first round of implementation. Most R&D teams are not in a position to fully subsidize the implementation costs for advanced technologies, so it is important to explore creative solutions.