Customer – Research Director

Brief – A Research Director needed to define a Research Strategy involving long, medium and short-term components of an internal and externally funded research programme to deliver new products and services for an automotive industry supplier.

Contribution – A separate Foresighting exercise was undertaken to gain a thorough understanding of what the future could potentially hold for the business.  A series of workshops provided a view of how the marketplace could evolve in the medium to longer-term and this market understanding informed the business planning process.  A hierarchy was created that spanned:  Business Strategy – Market Strategy – Product Strategy – Technology Strategy – Research Strategy.  These did not all exist as distinct documents however all of these components were present in the overall strategy.

Outcome – A market and business driven product and research strategy was created that established a clear linkage between the company’s research and the overall needs of the business.  This enabled targeted investments to be made with a greater certainty of a return on that investment.  Over time a stream of new product and service was delivered.