Comment trouver l’équilibre entre l’innovation et le risque dans la feuille de route de la R&D ?

Balancing innovation and risk in R&D roadmapping is crucial. Start by defining your innovation vision and strategy clearly. Then, use a portfolio approach to manage risk, spreading investments across various projects while promoting innovation. Apply lean and agile principles to stay adaptable amidst uncertainty, and involve stakeholders and customers in the process for diverse perspectives. Finally, regularly review and update your roadmap to ensure alignment with market needs and keep your innovation efforts on track. This iterative approach maintains the delicate balance between innovation and risk in R&D roadmapping effectively.

Implicit to the vision and strategy, you must be conscious of what is the innovation profile of your company. Not all the companies will set the bar at the same height in the balance between risk and innovation. Is your company bringing products first of their class having all what it takes to commercialize novelties? Are you fast followers able to launch when the demand ramps up? Are you cost-optimizers capitalizing high demand, low growth, commodities? Answer that and it will help you to set the bar.

Balancing innovation and risk in R&D roadmapping requires a strategic approach. Prioritize projects based on their potential impact and risk level, dedicating resources to both high-reward innovations and stable, lower-risk developments. Implement regular review checkpoints to assess progress and adapt strategies as needed. Diversifying the R&D portfolio is key; mix revolutionary projects with incremental improvements to stabilize risk. Encourage a culture of learning from failures to foster innovation without fear, ensuring lessons are integrated into future roadmaps. This balanced approach supports sustained innovation while managing risk effectively.

Here are some strategies to strike the right balance between innovation and risk in R&D road mapping: - Set Clear Objectives and Goals - Portfolio Approach - Risk Assessment and Mitigation - Iterative Prototyping and Testing - Cross-Functional Collaboration - Flexible Resource Allocation - Continuous Monitoring and Learning - Cultivate a Risk-Aware Culture - Scenario Planning - External Collaboration and Benchmarking - Regular Review and Adjustments By implementing these strategies, organizations can foster a balanced approach to R&D roadmapping, where innovation is pursued strategically, and risks are managed proactively to ensure sustained success and competitiveness in the market.

Establishing a robust innovation vision and strategy is fundamental for effective roadmap planning. A well-defined vision ensures focused resource allocation and strategic alignment, vital for successful product management. In essence, a well-crafted vision and strategy act as a roadmap’s North Star, ensuring every product decision contributes to the larger goals of the organization.

Adopting a portfolio approach in R&D means spreading your bets across safe and bold projects. For instance, Horizon 1 could focus on refining current offerings, like enhancing a software's user interface. Horizon 2 might explore new markets with existing technology, such as adapting a tech product for educational use. Horizon 3 is where you aim for breakthroughs, like developing a new renewable energy source. This strategy balances immediate improvements and future innovations, minimizing risk while pursuing growth.

In my perspective there should always a tracker to analyse the risk factors and the innovation should match and align with organisation business goals. Always top priority should be given for low risk and high impact elements in any stage of R&D Innovation! Talk to your customers frequently and understand market dynamics both inward and outward! This can help us to balance our roadmaps with respect to innovation and R&D

Diversifying Success Through a Portfolio Approach Adopting a portfolio approach is key to balancing innovation and risk in R&D roadmapping. By diversifying your R&D projects across different risk levels and innovation horizons, you can ensure a mix of short-term wins and long-term breakthroughs. This strategy allows for steady progress in technology development while mitigating overall risk. High-risk, high-reward projects can coexist with lower-risk initiatives, ensuring a stable yet progressive advancement towards your innovation goals. This balanced portfolio optimizes resource allocation and maximizes the potential for market impact and growth.

Using a portfolio approach in product management involves diversifying investments across a range of products, balancing risk and innovation. For instance, Alphabet Inc. (Google) manages a portfolio of products, including core services like Search and innovative ventures like Waymo, not to mention the M&As Google does not all of which are successful. This strategy allows them to mitigate risk by relying on established products while also fostering innovation through experimental ventures, acquisitions, ensuring long-term sustainability and growth.

Horizon 1: Incremental Innovation (Manage): Horizon 1 represents the core business activities that generate the majority of current revenue and profits. Focus on incremental improvements, operational efficiencies, and cost optimization. Manage risk by ensuring stability, reliability, and continuity of core business operations.

"Maximize learning per unit of Risk". Balance Innovation and regular business operations using agile Product and Portfolio management principles. Product: - Lean Startup principles, encouraging Hypothesis, experimentation and validated learning - Prioritizes features based on value(Market demand) and risk(Feasibility) - Regularly evaluate market feedback and adjusts roadmap and portfolio priorities - Risks mitigation actions and DCPs in roadmap Portfolio: - Ensure Alignment of strategic themes with organizational & business objectives - Diversify the portfolio, invest in a mix of high-risk/high-reward and low-risk/incremental projects - Regularly engage with stakeholders and communicate transparently

When you have clarity on the strategic product goal (the what and the why) but more is unknown than known about "the how", it is prudent to go for iterative approach towards product development. Identify your assumptions, have clear and transparent communication and instead of creating a detailed long-term roadmap, focus on creating short-term, flexible plans. Break down the roadmap into smaller, manageable chunks (e.g., quarterly or monthly). Each iteration should incorporate feedback, new learnings, and changes in the environment. This way when more and more is learnt from experience, you can adjust your roadmap accordingly to reach the final goal.

Applying lean and agile principles to manage uncertainty involves adopting flexible, iterative, and customer-centric approaches to problem-solving and project management. Here are some strategies to apply lean and agile principles effectively in uncertain environments: 1.Iterative Planning 2.Cross-Functional Collaboration 3.Minimum Viable Product (MVP) 4.Continuous Feedback Loop 5.Continuous Improvement 6.Continuous Delivery

In my experience, involving the stakeholders by providing timely demos are the best way to keep the product relevant and as per the customer's requirement. It ensures the right product is built and would eventually increase the stakeholder's interest in the product as they would be completely aligned with the product's progress.

In my experience it is always best to involve stakeholders very early in the product management lifecycle. Teams can have review sessions to share high-level thinking, the "why?" and the "what?" of the proposed idea and explicitly ask for feedback. It can save tens of work hours and lead to a more productive discovery and better product outcome in the end.

Getting stakeholders and customers on board with our roadmap is like having teammates in the driver’s seat. Their thoughts not only help us dodge potential issues but also bring in different viewpoints, making sure our innovations really hit the mark. It’s not just about projects; it’s about making this journey a team effort, where everyone’s on the same page and success is more likely.

Envisioning the product's benefits and impact in the near future by conversing with stakeholders, customers, sales persons, discussing what ifs with your identified product salient features and sharing ideas about what are the things that could help the stakeholders and the customers alike, this ensures lesser risk involved with greater probability of innovating the user journey. Gather as much feedback in the ideation, brainstorming and testing phases in your innovation and R&D roadmapping.

And don’t forget those that make the roadmap a reality, the employees and team members! They’re stakeholders, too, and deserve to own a piece of the process. Those working the frontlines can have intimate knowledge of best practices, what work and what doesn’t, and will deliver value to the end product in a way that goes beyond what is traditionally measured.

To ensure your R&D roadmap stays on track, consider revising it based on real-world outcomes and feedback. For example, if you've launched a mobile app feature expecting high user engagement, but analytics show low usage, it might be time to redirect focus. Alternatively, if a prototype of a new kitchen gadget receives positive feedback during customer testing, increasing investment in its development could be wise. Regularly evaluating and adjusting your plans based on actual results and customer feedback keeps your projects aligned with market needs and business goals, ensuring your efforts are effectively driving innovation.

Updating your roadmap means understanding the changes in what brings value to your product/project. Remaining flexible to the whims of the market while ensuring you understand the second and third order effects changes in both R&D and overall processes will have can ensure a solid foundation is built with value-added in mind. In this case intent of the policies/procedures/plans, etc. is greater than adhering to the letter of law spelled out in them. Empowering your team members to get after the work in new and innovative ways without being prescriptive in HOW they do it will net bigger gains in the end.

Here are examples of factors that can indicate updates to your roadmap: Customer feedback revealing feature shortcomings, introduction of a groundbreaking technology, market shifts necessitating changes in priorities, performance metrics indicating areas for improvement, competitive analysis highlighting emerging trends or threats, regulatory changes affecting product development, internal process improvements identified through audits, strategic shifts in organizational goals or direction, unexpected challenges encountered during project execution, and opportunities for collaboration with external stakeholders. Incorporating these factors into the roadmap ensures adaptability and alignment with evolving needs.

Innovation is all about idea to implementation to impact. Innovation could be on process, product, customer experience or business model. Narrative should be of risk mitigation rather than risk taking. Below are some proven tips - 1. To have a dedicated team to review the ideas to ensure effectiveness of review process. 2. To invest in sandbox environments for experimentation 3. For big ticket innovation - building MVP is indispensable, Its best to validate the commercialization aspect first before investing in heavy implementation. 4. Idea velocity measured via speed of execution from ideas to demo and from demo to the market is crucial. 5. To prefer platform innovation over product innovation.

An example to help navigate - Imagine building a data analytics platform for B2B sales teams. The strategies that can help: 1) Build portfolio and roadmap categorized by risk and innovation level - Low-risk/low-innovation: Improve data visualization capabilities and user interface based on user feedback - High-risk/low-innovation: Explore integrating with a new CRM system to expand your market reach - Low-risk/high-innovation: Develop AI-powered insights to predict sales outcomes and suggest next steps - High-risk/high-innovation: Build a real-time sales coaching tool using sentiment analysis from customer interactions 2) Use Agile development, data-driven decisions, clear communication, to balance innovation, risk and maximize success.

Nothing else to consider, just a reminder that will help you remember what happens if you don't ensure your company/product stays ahead in the R&D game: "If you don't put yourself out of business, someone else will. " - Gary V For product teams that quite simply means, if you don't innovate, someone else will. You make yourself vulnerable to loose clients to fancy new features that you could have built or even executed better, if you would have given your teams the time and headspace to actually innovate.

It is impôrtant for the team to agree on what R&D project success looks like before such work starts. Because the ratio of success to failure is 1:15, many projects are canned/binned/thrown away. This may lead to decrease in team’s morale. Therefore, understanding the definition of success/value-add helps.

3 C’s - Communication, Collaboration and Change management are key to balance the innovation and associated risk. While innovation drives growth and competitiveness, risk management ensures stability and sustainability. It is important to strike a balance that allows for creativity and experimentation while also mitigating potential risks. This requires a careful assessment of the potential benefits and drawbacks of each decision, as well as a willingness to adapt and learn from failures. By finding the right balance, businesses can foster a culture of continuous improvement and create a sustainable business model that can thrive in an ever-changing market.