Ford recently announced it is investing $1B for a new plant in India (U.S. automakers in race for Indian market – The Washington Post). Ford is going to change its strategy for the region and design new products designed specifically for the market: This new focus on India has required something of a philosophical shift
A couple of articles in the Oil and Glory blog describe innovation at Bell Labs (Book Review: Jon Gertner’s “The Idea Factory” and What Obama could learn from Bell Labs). Bell Labs, as the article points out, delivered many of the innovations that made modern devices possible: “The name Bell Labs is synonymous with cutting-edge invention, winning
I have been meaning to write about development and cancellation of Courier, an innovative tablet concept from Microsoft. The c|net article on the subject provides quite a bit of useful information – both about innovation management best practices and some opportunities for improvement. Courier was developed at Microsoft’s Skunkworks (Pioneer Studios). They invested quite a bit of
As we have discussed in the past, R&D management is challenging because most new products require many technologies to mature simultaneously and many engineering disciplines to work together. The only real answer to effective R&D management is effective R&D plans. R&D planning remains very hard and we have been discussing some approaches to address them. Good
Knowledge@Wharton has an interesting article Procter & Gamble: Mastering the Art of the Innovation Tournament. P&G CEO has set up a great challenge for the company (A great way to foster innovation is for the leader to create or emphasize challenges): Procter & Gamble CEO Bob McDonald is a man with a plan. Last year, he
One key point for R&D managers in Knowledge@Wharton article Clayton Christensen: ‘China’s Growth Will Force an Innovation Competition with the West’: But because China is growing so fast, they are now starting to feel the impact of their policy on population control. Wage rates are going up at a very fast rate… I don’t know who
McKinsey Quarterly has a useful guide in Sparking creativity in teams: In fact, our experience with hundreds of corporate teams, ranging from experienced C-level executives to entry-level customer service reps, suggests that companies can use relatively simple techniques to boost the creative output of employees at any level. The article has four simple suggestions to increase
We have often talked about incentive plans and their impact on motivating R&D teams. In”Impact of Incentive Bonus Plan” we discussed that unless the bonus plan can be tightly coupled with real metrics, they may actually reduce performance. The article “You are getting a bonus so why aren’t you motivated,” we learned that bonuses are
MIT’s Technology Review has some interesting survey results in the article Tapping the Innovative Masses: “We found that 6.2 percent—representing 2.9 million people, or two orders of magnitude more than are employed as product developers in the U.K.—created or modified consumer products over the past three years and spent 2.3 billion pounds per year, more than
In a previous post, I discussed how bureaucracy stifled innovation at Nokia. I ventured a guess that a formalized R&D portfolio balancing process might have helped counteract the effects of bureaucracy. An engadget post finally led me to an article with some concrete data and useful learnings for R&D managers. First observation is that Nokia’s R&D