Webinar: Innovation Tools – Catalyzing Their Adoption

High-value, highly trained R&D experts use a variety of tools to facilitate their work, find novel solutions, and increase their R&D throughput. Frequently, the ecosystem of tools that evolve within an organization are an assortment of tools acquired through education and experience, as well as those necessitated by innovation portfolio management. Within this ecosystem, there is a unique tension: technically sophisticated individuals tasked with driving organizational R&D need the freedom to innovate using their preferred methods, while to remain globally competitive organizations need to introduce cutting-edge tools and methods to accelerate innovation. Such new methods may entail large cultural shifts and capital investment, such as the introduction of foundational AI platforms or shifting to a design thinking paradigm; or these may be smaller shifts in practice, such as adding new stage-gate requirements like patent mining in early design stages. These initiatives frequently meet with mixed adoption, with ROI transparency that is murky, at best.

Our research investigates the key factors that drive the adoption of new R&D methods, asking the question “What are the catalysts and barriers that facilitate or inhibit adoption of new methods within the R&D culture?” This webinar will present an early analysis of interviews across three large R&D organizations that suggest a common set of catalysts and barriers at management, organizational, and individual levels, as well as a small set of features about the method itself that are critical to adoption. We will invite IRI member participants to share their own experiences, reflect on the relevance of the findings to their own organizations and work as a group to provide guidance on future research to drive value to the innovation community. Participants will also be provided with details about how their organization’s perspective can be included in ongoing research studies of this kind.