Description
The R&D imperative for industry has never been more compelling. The key to profit from R&D will be a new kind of company leadership. In Third Generation R&D, three senior executives of the international management and technology consulting firm Arthur D. Little-Philip A. Roussel, Kamal N. Saad, and Tamara J. Erickson- explain how firms can enhance the value of their R&D investments. Drawing on decades of experience with major corporations in a wide range of industries on all continents, they offer conceptual and practical guidance to corporate, business, and R&D management that, implemented with vision and determination, will lead to more effective and confident R&D organizations and growing return from the investment in them. Three broad approaches to R&D management characterize companies today, differentiated by philosophy, organization, and operating principles. Some firms still leave resource allocation decisions largely to R&D management. Many others, frustrated by the difficulty of realizing payoffs from large R&D investments, have moved toward a more systematic second generation model: they subject R&D projects to the same kind of cost-benefit scrutiny applied to other business investments. These companies have begun to apply the sort of purposeful R&D management recommended by Roussel, Saad, and Erickson. The second generation approach may better identify and manage individual projects, it will not ensure a strategically balanced portfolio of R&D work, a key objective of third generation management.ISBN:9780875842523
