R&D leaders at companies are increasingly relied upon for informing the business of new and emerging technologies (CEO’s don’t want “get surprised”). Corporate initiatives related to integrating new and emerging technology must overcome three central challenges. First, they must establish a robust capability to spot new technologies relevant to the company. Second, they must learn how to frame in in the strategic business context to generate excitement with the business partners. Finally, they must learn how selected technologies can be integrated into a business model that the business can support.

Of the three challenges – spotting – framing – learning – the most attention is typically given to the first one – finding new technologies that can become new growth ideas. While this is not trivial, the real challenge arises when the new ideas need to be turned into business opportunities and adopted by the business units. Particularly, when these new opportunities do not fit neatly with business model of the core business.

We share a practical approach that we adopted for spotting-framing-learning with the focus on 1) building reliable internal and external networks to systematically uncover technologies, 2) providing strategic context to ensure relevance and early engagement of business partners, and 3) using a structured learning processes that ensures adoption by the business units.

Large companies are not start-ups and never will be! They are designed and operate differently. To innovate effectively, large companies can’t simply replicate start-up principles. Rather, they must adapt start-up principles in ways that are smart and tailored to their organization.

During two webcasts, Irene shares a practical, unified framework that any company can apply to build a more efficient, agile and impactful innovation system – and one that works with your structure and specific innovation objectives. Informed by her first-hand experience delivering innovations (both failures and successes) within leading global corporations, Irene will share a foundation to “move the needle” toward the execution success.

A critical innovation competency is the ability to recognize technologies that can best be exploited by a particular company and to drive investment in them. We have developed a framework for identifying and developing technology-based business opportunities in new areas for a company. The framework brings together many aspects of emerging business opportunity identification and deployment, and is centered on defining a critical set of capabilities needed to address evolving market challenges.

Electronic Version of the article published in Research-Technology Management, July-August 2015, vol.58, p.p.17-27. Available online www.iri.org/rtm

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Technology landscape maps can help organizations build awareness of strategic technologies and identify opportunities at the intersection of emerging technologies and customer needs.

Electronic version of an article published in Research‐Technology Management, July—August 2013, pp. 27-35. Available online www.iriweb.org/rtm

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Based on the answers, the tool generates the opportunity’s risk profile and highlights critical variables that can affect economic value and commercial success. Through a few carefully designed steps, the tool guides the team to generate a clear and concise “next 30-day” plan to address the key risks. With this tool, it is easy to bring clarity and focus to high-uncertainty programs, create un-biased program recommendations and communicate the program status to the leadership and decision-makers.