Four Keys to an Optimized R&D Portfolio

by | Apr 6, 2018 | Uncategorized

Is your R&D portfolio producing the right balance of incremental improvements and innovative projects necessary to stay ahead of the competition?  Are you funding too many incremental improvements over potential breakthrough innovations?  Is focusing on ROI providing you the right portfolio mix?

These are the types of questions that many of our clients are facing as they strive to outpace the competition.  This competition is advancing from all sides, including traditional competitors as well as upstarts coming seemingly out of “left field.”  In order to win in the marketplace, product development and manufacturing companies need a robust R&D portfolio, one that provides a well-rounded pipeline of future products.

Companies typically don’t lack for interesting potential projects or programs vying to be included in the portfolio — they lack the appropriate mechanisms and strategic rigor to determine what projects should “make the cut” (and receive the needed funding and personnel).  What can be done to address this?  Our experience points to 4 key elements:

Align Strategically — specify whether and how a project explicitly furthers strategic goals.  Many companies fund projects in the portfolio by focusing primarily on what we call “value to the company”, such as ROI.  Including value to the company is necessary, but not sufficient in portfolio optimization — overreliance on it results in an unbalanced portfolio.  Strategic alignment focuses on how well the candidate project advances strategic goals, ideally by market segment.  The prerequisite here is clarity regarding the competitive goals of the company (by product line) in each segment and geography, as well as a clear understanding of “how you’ll win” in each.

Tie to Value to the Customer — identify the specific value that the project brings to the customer.  This value is defined by the factors that are most important to the customer.  This is not easily determined, but is critical to an optimized portfolio and provides the added benefit of focusing on a deeper understanding of customer needs and how your products are used by customers to create value.  For one customer, we created a graphic representation — based on analytics established by Marketing & Engineering — that clearly depicts this value across a few key criteria versus both the competitive product and the closest internal product.

Categorize – another key to attaining (and maintaining) an appropriately balanced product portfolio is to assess and categorize types of projects flowing into R&D — are they breakthroughs, differentiators, followers?  When we did this at one of our large manufacturing clients, they realized that their R&D portfolio was too heavily weighted toward incremental improvement (“me too”) projects and not enough truly innovative potential “game changers.”  A rigorous set of criteria and assessment to determine the category in which a project resides enables proper allocation and encourages development teams to focus on the ways to create value that matter most to customers.

Simplify – new product proposals/justifications typically rely on lengthy documents, spreadsheets, presentations, etc. in an effort to display rigor and provide proposal gravitas.  Yet the executive team making R&D portfolio decisions can rarely read (much less digest) all this documentation.  If the elements outlined above are rigorously and consistently developed, then it’s possible to concisely pull all of the information together into a short (even single page!) document highlighting the key elements required for decision-makers to make an informed R&D portfolio decision, or inquire more deeply into the issues that really matter.

Incorporating these keys into your company’s process for shaping the R&D portfolio will not only focus your decision-making, but it will result in a strategically optimized product portfolio to stave off (and gain market share) from competitors.

Blockchain and Business Models

Blockchain and Business Models

by | Apr 6, 2018 | Uncategorized

Blockchain is entering the business mainstream (it’s not just for BitCoin), and technology vendors are racing to establish position in hopes of becoming major platforms (just search “business applications of blockchain” to get a taste).

Blockchain is the technology underlying cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin — but its utility goes far beyond cryptocurrencies.  At core, blockchain is a secure, peer-to-peer (distributed) database — a ledger of transactions.  Because it is shared, encrypted, and auditable, it is extremely difficult to forge or cheat; each block (transaction) is dependent on those that surround it.  It can be permissioned, so only validated participants can view or transact in it.  And “smart contracts” (automated transactions which execute only when certain conditions are met) can be embedded within Ethereum blockchain, enabling secure, frictionless transacting on a massive scale.  (Indeed, Ethereum can be thought of as a publicly-accessible yet secure distributed computing platform.)

The secure, distributed ledger obviates the need to reconcile the different ledgers of all the participants in a chain of transactions, and supplies a common, secure, transparent “source of truth” for all the participants.  This makes blockchain particularly useful for processes where transactions occur among many participants; trust is required; and being able to verify the legitimacy and identity (even if anonymized) of participants is critical, such as:  healthcare records; voting; supply chains; and especially financial services such as banking and insurance.  Being able to process transactions with greater “efficiency, security, privacy, reliability, and speed” could revolutionize many business processes.  (https://www.strategy-business.com/article/A-Strategists-Guide-to-Blockchain?gko=0d586)

The reduction in transactional friction enabled by blockchain will have broad-based benefits, but the more far-reaching effects may be in the enablement of new business models.

A business model describes how value is created, harvested, and distributed.  One familiar example is the “razors and blades” model, wherein the razor is sold at relatively low margin to lock the buyer into using proprietary blades — which are then sold at a high margin.  (Consumer printers are predominantly sold with this model as well.)  The participants in this model are the individual consumer; distributors and retailers; and the manufacturer of the products.  The value is whatever the consumer will pay to get a shave; the powerful part of this model is that most of this value is harvested by the manufacturer over time via the sale of consumables (blades, or toner cartridges in the case of printers); and shared by the vendor and the sales channel.

Now, consider the conventional business model for insurance:  the participants are the buyer (either individual or an entity); the underwriter (insurance company); and the sales channel.  Value is created in two ways:  in the first (underwriting), risk is pooled by the insurer (across time and space), and priced to each customer as a fraction of that pool.  This works because what is a one-time risk for the insured, when pooled with many other similar risks over time and geographies, becomes a predictably probabilistic risk for the underwriter.  The second way value is created is by the insurer earning returns on the invested capital covering all the risks.  Insurers generally make most of their money on the latter (not underwriting) — especially because the administrative costs of quoting, underwriting, issuing contracts (policies), collecting premiums, claims service, etc. are substantial.

Blockchain’s first impact on the insurance business model is in reducing these administrative costs and enabling new capabilities within the current business model, such as on-demand insurance:

“Insurers are riddled with inefficient processes in every part of the value chain, which creates a plethora of opportunities to leverage a technology like blockchain.  Fundamentally, blockchain technology is a series of distributed ledgers that allows for trusted interactions to occur with immutable audit trails. The concept of a “Smart Contract” in a blockchain, associated with an event or an object, would allow for on-demand risk assessment with just-in-time underwriting based on simultaneous access to a single set of trusted facts, shorter duration, event-based personalized, insurance products and dynamic claims events without first notice of loss (FNOL), all without a customer trigger or fraud. As a result, this will dramatically lower transaction costs and risks, lower premiums, revolutionize the customer experience and expand the insurance customer base” (http://iireporter.com/how-blockchain-will-fit-in-the-new-on-demand-insurance-ecosystem/).

But beyond that, blockchain could enable new insurance business models, such as broadly crowd-funded or peer-to-peer insurance.  (https://www.darwinrecruitment.com/blog/2017/03/a-new-blockchain-enabled-business-model-in-the-insurance-branch)  In crowd-funded insurance, the underwriter focuses on risk assessment and pricing, and moves away from asset management (which dramatically reduces capital intensity for the insurer).  Instead, the insurer posts expected returns, and interested investors bid for the contracts (or portions).  Up to this point, this model looks like Lloyd’s, or peer-to-peer lending markets.  But blockchain smart contracts make the execution processes transparent and automated, even guaranteeing payments (with no need of a bank), and without the insurance company managing a large pool of capital.  Instead, a much broader pool of investors can participate, still holding the capital themselves (unlike a syndicate such as Lloyd’s, which has a limited number of “names”).

In this model, insurance could be less costly to customers, and it might be easier to insure very specific risks.

Of course, such a model is much more attractive to new entrants than to incumbents in the business, who already have accumulated capital assets to manage for their own benefit (and pay claims when necessary).

Blockchain may have implications for your business — it may even empower new competitors you can barely imagine.  And it’s coming fast.

Why Leading Companies Need Rapid Cycle Strategy Development

Why Leading Companies Need Rapid Cycle Strategy Development

by | Apr 6, 2018 | Uncategorized

In today’s constantly evolving and increasingly competitive business landscape, many companies are urgently developing new products/services and exploring new revenue streams.  However, their traditionally developed business strategies are either outdated or not as directly applicable.  Over time, strategy comes unmoored from competitive reality, leading to misalignment of the company’s offerings, target markets, development priorities, marketing messages, and so on.

Sometimes it’s appropriate to do a full strategic overhaul, committing to a lengthy and far-reaching conventional strategy project.  But some companies are beginning to “think different” (Apple’s classic mantra) about strategy.  They realize that a clear, concise and timely strategy coupled with the right offerings and capabilities is the way they are going to win in the marketplace.  And large, long, expensive strategy efforts may not get them there soon enough (if at all).  Increasingly, companies are looking for ways to update their business strategies in a more rapid, focused way.

What is Rapid Cycle Strategy?

Rapid Cycle Strategy is a methodology for compressing and focusing the strategy development cycle to more effectively align with the realities of changing internal and external environments.  Rapid Cycle Strategies operate over shorter time horizons and are quicker to develop and test – and thus are more responsive to your (and your competitors’) innovation cycles.  They require fewer resources to develop and are significantly less costly than traditional strategy programs.

A Rapid Cycle Strategy project includes these elements:

  • Identify the key mismatches between current strategy-in-practice, demonstrated capabilities, and the competitive landscape — good candidates for these mismatches are almost always known or suspected among the executive team, and it doesn’t necessarily require time-consuming, deep study to reveal them.
  • For each mismatch, specify “what you would have to believe” to think that relieving the mismatch would make a real difference; and then test that (where possible) quickly and economically.
  • For each mismatch, decide “what you would have to do” to fix it, and how hard that would be: would you need new products / services?  Different capabilities?  Different business models?  Different organizational structure?  Different people?  Different customers?  Different markets?
  • Select one or two to work on first, prioritizing more highly those with a better combination of potential payoff and the work required to fix the mismatch.
  • Craft a set of actions (assigning accountability) to fix the selected mismatches, and test (where possible) with pilot programs and test markets. Make adjustments on the basis of the testing.
  • Develop and communicate a strategy statement which clearly describes what you are changing and why.

Many strategy efforts eventually address these items, but often take a long time to get there — and many times the organization feels “disconnected” from the work and the resulting choices.  Our experience has shown that there is a better way.  A few focused, multi-disciplinary workshops comprised of subject matter experts enables the harvesting of tribal knowledge.  This knowledge is of better quality and is much more rapidly developed than by traditional means.

“Cutting to the chase” in this manner not only enables a more accurate, timely and cost effective strategy, but it engenders “buy-in” for subsequent execution.  Many strategy efforts are wasted as there is not alignment and buy-in from those responsible for its ultimate success.  The Rapid Cycle Strategy process significantly increases the chance of success.

Will the senior executive teams of major corporations move away from large corporate strategy efforts in the near future?  Possibly not, but increasingly the business units/divisions of these companies are — and you should be too!