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| Workshop, Wednesday, 09.00-12.30, 5 July 2006, Oxford University |
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Strategic Knowledge Management in R&D
Led by Victor Newman, The Knowledgeworks, Visiting Professor in KM & Innovation to the Open University Business School (former CLO, Pfizer)
A classic cue for being locked within a strategic box is the situation that Andy Grove of Intel characterised as a "strategic inflection-point" or a "time in the life of a business when its fundamentals are about to change. That can mean an opportunity to rise to new heights". If an industry has large R&D budgets but exhibits an inexorable decline in the number of new launched innovative products, is it the case that such an industry is at such an inflection-point or more probably has yet to respond meaningfully to it? An inflection-point where its greatest danger might be to become efficient at driving a strategy with noticeably decreasing returns at a time when we should respond to the productivity signals that require a move into more effective, alternative strategies? What kind of paradigms form the retaining-walls of our own strategy-box, what assumptions underpin it, and how can we begin to consider escape strategies?
Everyone knows that innovation is key, but intellectually it remains easier to squeeze the margins and go for minor differentiation around existing products than to do something new. Ironically whilst the emergent strategy is failing to deliver it can be career-limiting to initiate conversations around innovation with the risk of triggering defensive behaviours from functions and organisations dedicated to maintaining resource-allocation and career-structures developed during periods of growth. Now is the time to review some of our assumptions. Many of these assumptions are implicit within our strategic choices and need to be revisited regularly to prevent them becoming hidden strategy-traps that consume investment to little return. We need to actively consider our hidden, and often tacit agenda of assumptions and constraints. We need to articulate these assumptions, explore their current validity and develop alternatives tactics to escape from a potentially decaying strategy box.
This workshop will include an Innovation Café approach to demonstrate a new kind of conversation that quickly leads to documented, useable tactics in authentic language. This will involve participants in two types of innovation thinking by:
1) Inviting participants to visualise a scenario where optimum confidence has been realised, and then to work backwards to define and prioritise the necessary capabilities that need to be constructed to make it happen;
2) Using reversal-thinking to pose questions about innovation failure to identify what we know intuitively works, now; and to turn it into usable knowledge to make the capabilities developed in the success visualisation a reality.
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Victor Newman, Knowledgeworks, Victor was Pfizer's Chief Learning Officer (2000-2004) and with David Gurteen has designed the Innovation Cafe (iCafe) approach to design rapid, dynamic conversations that encourage behaviours that drive innovation within organizations. His leadership of innovation in the form of pragmatic solutions that connect knowledge in new ways and skunkworks projects transformed global best-practice in Pfizer. Victor has a prevailing interest in the psychology of implementation, derived from his work with CEOs and diverse and intense consulting experience with many industrial sectors.
His recent application of his influential "BoxLogic" KM technique designed to develop a portfolio of innovative strategies, by exploring the limitations of the existing business paradigm within Pfizer, identified key strategic opportunities to transform business strategy and change the basis of measuring and creating new market value.
As Visiting Professor in KM and Innovation, he leads the Lifesciences MBA Consortium in partnership with the Open University Business School in Europe. Victor has contributed to Harvard Business Review, been featured in The Wall Street Journal, is author of "Made to Measure Problem Solving" and his "Knowledge Activist's Handbook" from Capstone/Wiley & Sons was recently cited as the "best management book within the last ten years".
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