Archive for the ‘Strategy’ Category

Strategy: Research Portfolio Planning and Management

Tuesday, August 8th, 2006

Strategy: Research Portfolio Planning and Management

Competitiveness in the market is dependent on exploiting new technology opportunities. Identifying and developing new technology requires effective investment in long-term research and development. Yet at the same time, there is the perception that research investments are not producing sufficient market returns.

Corporations need to maximize market return on investment in research efforts through effective research portfolio planning. This requires optimizing the balance between short-term and long-term research effort, incremental and breakthrough research results, risk and reward. Effective research portfolio planning can deliver optimum research results and maximum return on investment in research efforts.

Challenges of Research Portfolio Planning

Effective research portfolio planning goes well beyond simply balancing risk and uncertainty against technical opportunity and potential market reward. For a research portfolio to be effective it must meet the business needs of the sponsoring company and produce results that are able to be transferred into the company’s product lines once mature. The research organization and its associated business units must overcome the following challenges:

  1. Asynchrony between the corporation’s business strategies and research strategies

    1. Business strategies lacking the potential vision of research direction

    2. Research strategies not aligned with business direction

    3. Ineffective communication between business units and research

    4. Research project selection not informed by long-term business direction

    5. Out-of-touch “ivory tower” negative perception of research within business units

  2. Short-term research pressure from business units

    1. Assembly-line research mentality

    2. Resistance to investing in risky, uncertain, long-term research

  3. Balancing long-term and short-term research

    1. Breakthrough technology potential

    2. Developing foundation for short-term research

    3. Embracing failure as a useful research result

  4. Technology transfer challenges

    1. New technology disruptive to existing product lines

    2. Incomplete amortization of previous research through existing product lines

    3. Markets not ready for new research directions

    4. Research results out-of-sync with product line strategies

    5. Lack of product engineers’ experience with new technology

  5. Research management challenges

  1. Lack of communication and collaboration between business units and research organizations

  2. Technology transfer management challenges

  3. Marketing the research organization within the corporation

  4. Developing pre-product market development campaigns for forthcoming research results

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Strategy: Early Market Development and “The Rubber-Chicken Circuit”

Sunday, May 14th, 2006

On his blog “The Post Money Value“, Rick Segal has some excellent advice for early-stage entreprenuers that find themselves in the spot-light of The Rubber Chicken Circuit. Few startups have the people resources to be able to afford to galavant around the rubber-chicken circuit during their pre-product phase. Even if they have the capital resources for such adventures, the opportunity costs associated with having their senior executive distracted from their primary duties is far too high.

That said, there is also some value in strategically (i.e. selectively) exploiting the spot-light, if you find yourself so blessed.

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Strategy: Competitive Standards Strategy

Thursday, April 27th, 2006

While competitors and customers believe in standards that are fair, impartial and open, a company’s competitive interests are often met by seeking unfair, proprietary and closely controlled advantage. Yet the open standards process is valuable to a company in broadening the potential market, building a positive market reputation and building a community of potential customers. The challenge is to participate in and drive standards in a fair, impartial and open manner while internally pursuing an aggressive competitive product, market and standards strategy. This article will discuss:

  • Value of the Standards Process;
  • Ethics and the Standards Process;
  • Challenges of the Standards Process;
  • Competitive Strategy and the Standards Process.

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Strategy: Lessons from Texas Hold’em

Thursday, April 20th, 2006

I don’t play cards, but I enjoy watching Texas Hold’em poker on TV. One might think that watching other people play cards would be boring. On the contrary. Poker games present a microcosm of strategy, tactics, personality traits and clues. I’ve learned a few important lessons about corporate strategy while watching these games.

  1. If you’re going to play a hand, bet based on the effect you want to have around the table (market) rather than betting based on the actual strength of your hand.
  2. Use your position at the table to lure your competition into an uncompetitive position.
  3. When you believe you have the best hand, play it for the long haul rather than just using it to grab a quick win.
  4. All you need is a chip and a chair to play. Many players have rebounded from near zero to win the tournament.
  5. Two or three solid wins will turn an also ran back into a chip leader.
  6. Play a tight game early in a tournament while evaluating the competition.
  7. Play an aggressive game once you understand the other players.
  8. When playing head-to-head with a competitor, take no prisoners.

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Strategy: The Palladium Print System

Wednesday, April 12th, 2006

In 1986, within a few weeks of joining Digital Equipment Corporation as an Enterprise Management Architect, I was tossed a “simple” assignment of resolving a distributed queuing problem between VMS, Ultrix and the new line of LPS networked laser print servers. Customers were complaining that print jobs were not being printed in exact time-stamp order, with suspicion that one operating system was being given precedence over the other operating system. Since there was a bit of contention between the VMS proponents and the Ultrix proponents, the problem needed to be corrected to avoid internecine fighting within the customer-base. The real problem was with the lack of a coherent distributed queuing strategy between multiple print servers (each of which pre-queued a small number of jobs at a time) and multiple client OS printer queues. As anyone with experience standing in line at the bank knows, it can be a crap shoot who gets to a teller first when there are multiple lines to multiple tellers.

Solving the problem required more than a simple fix to the LPS and OS queuing systems. The solution was a new model for distributed printing across the networked printer and software product lines. So, I joined Tom Hastings from the Printer Division and colleagues from across engineering, program management and marketing to define a common Print Systems Model for the corporation.

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