Case studies in achieving client-centered R&D organizations

Growing financial and business pressures on R&D groups have moved these to take on cost-recovery, outsourcing, partnering, creation of consortia and other forms of collaborative structures to carry out research more cost-effectively. However, before undertaking any collaborative R&D effort, it is essential to ensure that the core R&D of technical group itself has the desired focus and required linkage to its primary client group. This is the challenge addressed in this paper, which describes three case studies where R&D organizations were successfully re-focused on their primary technology client targets using a powerful transformation tool known as the SIMPLEX ^TM creative problem solving process