Rick Eagar
Partner Emeritus
Rick advises large companies and public organizations on innovation, R&D and technology management, including strategy, organization and performance improvement.
Areas of Focus
Education
University of Bristol
BSc (Hons), Mechanical Engineering
Past Experience
Shell International Petroleum Company
Project Manager, Head of Planning and Cost Engineering Netherlands (N.A.M) / Oman (Petroleum Dev Oman)
Rick is Partner Emeritus at Arthur D. Little and Chairman of the editorial board of ADL’s management journal, PRISM
Rick has over 28 years of consulting experience in technology and innovation management, R&D strategy and organization, and 10 years of industrial experience in capital projects. His sector focus included transport, oil & gas, energy, chemicals, food & drink, nuclear, government, and consumer goods.
Examples of his work included R&D, organizational and process redesign, transformation of national research institutes, new growth strategies, innovation strategies, technology strategies, and benchmarking.
Before becoming Partner Emeritus, Rick was Chief Innovation Officer and Global Leader of the Technology & Innovation Management Practice, responsible for the firm’s functional expertise in innovation, R&D, and technology management.
Rick published on innovation and R&D management and is a regular speaker at international conferences.
He speaks fluent Dutch in addition to his native English.
Shaking up Middle Eastern banking
The Middle Eastern (ME) banking sector is experiencing a profound transformation, driven by technological advancements, regulatory shifts, and evolving consumer expectations. As the region diversifies its economies and seeks to reduce reliance on oil, banks are at the forefront of this change.
Adapting to an uncertain future
Mitigation gets most of the big headlines in the global discourse on the changing climate. However, no matter how successful — or not — the world is at mitigating global warming, many of the impacts of climate change are already underway and will greatly affect our future.
Making the shift
When Arthur D. Little (ADL) first set up its Future of Mobility Lab in 2010, there was much optimism that by now, we would have made significant progress toward the goal of more sustainable, resilient, safe, inclusive, efficient, and human-centric mobility systems in our cities. Technological developments — particularly the rapid advances of digitalization, connectivity, and automation — promised the ability to deliver tailored, diverse, and convenient mobility solutions to customers that would be attractive enough to prompt a major shift away from private cars.
Navigating AI: Challenging the north star
AI adoption by companies is gathering pace, but initial use cases naturally tend to focus on optimization and efficiencies around internal use cases instead of novel AI-enabled products, services, and business models. In this Viewpoint, we use examples from a range of industries, exploring why companies should ensure they are positioned to seize long-term, revolutionary, and client-centric AI opportunities.
Beyond systems
Digitalization has become embedded within large businesses, with recent advances in AI accelerating the process even further. While we still need more progress, the fusion of business and IT functions is ever present, as “softwarization” of companies proceeds apace. IT functions need to recognize this pace of change and evolve toward being true strategic advisers to the business, driving innovation. In this Viewpoint, we examine some practical approaches for CIOs to bring about change.
Be careful out there
By now, business executives are well aware that using artificial intelligence (AI), especially generative AI (GenAI) such as ChatGPT, brings with it certain risks as well as benefits. Apart from the commonly cited existential risk of a future artificial general intelligence posing a threat to mankind, there are plenty of less severe but more likely risks. Those that most people have read about already are possible biases in GenAI’s outputs, as well as its propensity to “hallucinate” on occasion.
Embedding climate financing with net zero focus
One of the biggest challenges for delivering on the world’s climate change commitments is how to finance the huge costs involved. As climate-tipping points approach ever closer, there is a pressing need to embed climate change–related issues into investment and funding decision-making, both public and private. In this Viewpoint, we look at what this entails and set out some priorities for businesses, financial institutions, and government — working collaboratively — to narrow the funding gap.
Web3 & Metaverse — The rise of the new Internet & the India opportunity
Metaverse and Web3 are often used as umbrella terms for the next generation of the Internet, and the transformation they signify presents both a challenge and an opportunity for India. While some remain skeptical, we believe Metaverse and Web3 will lead the frontiers of the next wave of digital adoption for Indian industries. This Viewpoint explores the market potential of this next version of the Internet across different industries in India and gives an overview of the early use cases tested by industries in India and across the globe.
Quantum summer or winter?
There are still big uncertainties about how quantum computing (QC) will evolve — will there be a breakthrough, when might it happen, and which technologies and applications do we expect to succeed?
This Viewpoint shares the results of a Blue Shift by Arthur D. Little (ADL) survey, inviting more than 500 experts and industry executives to gauge their views on critical uncertainties and future scenarios; to draw conclusions on technology maturity, pace, and impact; and to help illustrate what this might mean for business.
The Industrial Metaverse
From good to great: Enhancing innovation performance through effective management processes
Take off or trough?
“Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.” – Niels Bohr
The Metaverse, beyond fantasy
Unleashing the business potential of quantum computing
METAVERSE - THE NEXT DIGITAL REVOLUTION FOR BUSINESS?
A revolution powered by VR has been promised for decades, but it’s only recently that improvements in hardware and software, together with a new level of consumer engagement, have started to converge to create something that could be genuinely disruptive in the foreseeable future. If you are in the business of gaming or entertainment the potential is clear, but what could the metaverse mean for the rest of the business world, and what are some of the challenges that will need to be overcome?
Unleashing innovation in IT
IT is still often seen as inflexible and costly
Digitalization has been at the top of the strategic agenda for over a decade (see Figure 1). IT assets, and the function that manages them, are usually seen as the backbone of the digitalization effort.
Appetite for disruption – Making the most of the future of food
Being the leader of a global food and beverage business has been anything but easy over recent years. Going back a decade, the industry had a reputation for being fairly stable and conservative, dominated by a limited number of global brands that delivered steady growth and margins. Since then, the industry has been shaken by a succession of disruptions, including sluggish demand for traditional core products, rapidly changing consumer patterns and preferences, accelerating technological developments, and evolving attitudes towards the environmental and social impacts of food production.
The Future of Mobility postCOVID-19 – Turning a crisis into an opportunity
Deserted city roads and empty buses and trains were among the most striking images from pandemic lockdowns around the world. However, successful cities have a gift for adapting to radically changing circumstances – how can the crisis be used to drive more sustainable, resilient, human-centric mobility systems? Based on a major research study, this article focuses on six game changers for players in the mobility ecosystem.
Artificial intelligence in mobility
Beyond the hype, where the true value lies
Strategy: How to cope with the uncertainties of tomorrow’s new world
Planning for the future has never been more difficult given the unstable and uncertain global environment that businesses face at both a macro and micro level. Based on insights from client conversations and internal experts, we outline the range of potential scenarios organizations could face, along with guidance and best practice on making strategic decisions in tomorrow’s new world.
Risk: Strengthening business resilience after COVID-19
Despite that they had invested in comprehensive crisis management planning, the spread of COVID-19 found many companies ill-prepared, even though it was a known risk with extreme consequences and a reasonable likelihood of occurring. Looking at the evidence, the authors consider the underlying causes of this poor preparedness and set out the key elements of a new business resilience approach suitable for the post- COVID-19 world.
Next-generation business resilience management
Responses from large companies to the COVID-19 crisis have brought into sharp focus serious shortcomings in current risk and business continuity management approaches, such as lack of suitable data and intelligence, inadequate appreciation of risk velocity, and not enough agility to adapt to rapidly changing situations. Well before the crisis, Arthur D. Little (ADL) pioneered and deployed a new business resilience management approach with, at its core, an innovative predictive analytics tool powered by machine-learning technology to address these shortcomings.
The Company of Tomorrow
The COVID-19 crisis hit the world as this edition of Prism was in preparation. Needless to say, the outlook for business, at least in the short term, has changed radically in just a few weeks. Nevertheless, it’s becoming increasingly clear that one effect of the crisis has been acceleration of trends that were already there, such as virtualization of the workplace, further penetration of digital technologies (for example, AI and the IoT), and “asset-light” business models that make businesses more responsive and resilient to rapid shocks.
Aviation year zero – The future is reinvention
It is clear to all that COVID-19 has dealt a devastating blow to the aviation industry. However, while the pre-crisis industry was still thriving from the waves of globalization and commoditization of travel, it was already facing threats such as environmental pressures, unbalanced profit sharing along the value chain, and multiple constraints on operational and business agility. The recovery phase will be extremely challenging, and we believe future growth will involve nothing less than reinvention of the industry.
Turning customers into subscribers – How to successfully make the shift
What customers expect from manufacturing businesses is changing, moving away from outright purchase- to subscription-based models. This offers opportunities and risks for traditional players, providing them with access to greater customer insight, but also lowering barriers for competitors. Based on case examples, this article looks at how manufacturers can make the shift to subscriptionbased businesses.
Managing clinical trials during COVID-19 and beyond
One of the many consequences of the COVID-19 crisis has been difficulty in continuing to enroll and run clinical trials, which typically involve large numbers of people interacting in multiple geographies. Arthur D. Little (ADL) has pioneered and deployed a new, risk-based predictive analytical approach, powered by machine-learning technology. It enables pharma companies to make much better predictions and forecasts to support decision-making around key issues, such as adapting patient targets to favor less affected and recovering geographies, program extensions, and new trials.
Leading businesses through the COVID-19 crisis
Leading businesses through the COVID-19 crisis
First learnings from Asia and Italy
Converging on the Future
Convergence seems to be everywhere in the business world these days. It covers a wide range of factors which can come together to change the status quo in an industry or value chain. Think of food and healthcare in functional foods, or telecoms and energy in smart grids. Digital technology has been a huge enabler of convergence.
The next generation of corporate incubators
While large organizations have enthusiastically embraced the creation of in-house corporate incubators to identify and support breakthrough growth opportunities with start-ups, the results have been disappointing for many. This article argues that to overcome these challenges and successfully scale up new opportunities, corporates have to embrace next-generation models.
Sense of Purpose
From time to time concepts that, at first sight, seem quite old fashioned suddenly get a new lease of life. For example, open innovation has been around for decades, but it’s come to the fore again in recent years in the context of converging industries, start-up collaborations and the rise of the innovation ecosystem.
Innovation purpose
Innovation is central to success for businesses today, yet many large, asset-heavy companies with decentralized business units struggle to combine R&D agility with common, clearly communicable corporate strategies. This article, based on experience at a large global energy company, explains how a purpose-driven approach to R&D can deliver innovation agility across the organization.
Can food and beverage leaders find their footing?
New growth outside the core business is at the top of the CEO agenda for many companies in mature sectors. Large food and beverage companies are in a race to increase the “rate of change,” deploying a variety of strategies to stay flexible, broaden their product portfolio, and keep their brands relevant. Traditional innovation methods of investing in internal R&D or rolling up start-ups are not rapidly creating and developing new step-out business quickly enough.
Corporate/ start-up collaboration
Why is it important for large corporations to work with start-ups?
It’s well known that businesses are being disrupted faster than ever before. Innovation launch and adoption cycles are dropping. For credit cards to reach 100 million users? 25 years. Online banking? 10 years. WhatsApp? 2 years. Candy Crush? A matter of months.
Entrepreneurial start-ups are one of the main driving forces for this acceleration. Almost 65% of Fortune 500 companies joined the list in the last 20 years.
The CEO - Lost in space and time?
Being a CEO today is a very different experience than it was even a decade ago – in the past a new CEO would know the space where their company operated and be given time to effect change. This has been transformed – space has expanded, while time has contracted dramatically. How can CEOs understand this new landscape and successfully plot courses through it?
Breakthrough Incubator
New growth outside the core business is at the top of the CEO agenda for many companies in mature sectors. Our Breakthrough Incubator service is a unique and powerful model for creating and delivering new step-out businesses. Using this approach Arthur D.
The Breakthrough Incubator
Creating a new step-out business is not easy
Achieving the revenue growth that markets expect can be challenging: growth by acquisition is expensive, and organic growth is often too slow and incremental. Therefore, a key priority for global corporations is to improve performance in breakthrough innovation to overcome the growth gap.
Rick is Partner Emeritus at Arthur D. Little and Chairman of the editorial board of ADL’s management journal, PRISM
Rick has over 28 years of consulting experience in technology and innovation management, R&D strategy and organization, and 10 years of industrial experience in capital projects. His sector focus included transport, oil & gas, energy, chemicals, food & drink, nuclear, government, and consumer goods.
Examples of his work included R&D, organizational and process redesign, transformation of national research institutes, new growth strategies, innovation strategies, technology strategies, and benchmarking.
Before becoming Partner Emeritus, Rick was Chief Innovation Officer and Global Leader of the Technology & Innovation Management Practice, responsible for the firm’s functional expertise in innovation, R&D, and technology management.
Rick published on innovation and R&D management and is a regular speaker at international conferences.
He speaks fluent Dutch in addition to his native English.
Shaking up Middle Eastern banking
The Middle Eastern (ME) banking sector is experiencing a profound transformation, driven by technological advancements, regulatory shifts, and evolving consumer expectations. As the region diversifies its economies and seeks to reduce reliance on oil, banks are at the forefront of this change.
Adapting to an uncertain future
Mitigation gets most of the big headlines in the global discourse on the changing climate. However, no matter how successful — or not — the world is at mitigating global warming, many of the impacts of climate change are already underway and will greatly affect our future.
Making the shift
When Arthur D. Little (ADL) first set up its Future of Mobility Lab in 2010, there was much optimism that by now, we would have made significant progress toward the goal of more sustainable, resilient, safe, inclusive, efficient, and human-centric mobility systems in our cities. Technological developments — particularly the rapid advances of digitalization, connectivity, and automation — promised the ability to deliver tailored, diverse, and convenient mobility solutions to customers that would be attractive enough to prompt a major shift away from private cars.
Navigating AI: Challenging the north star
AI adoption by companies is gathering pace, but initial use cases naturally tend to focus on optimization and efficiencies around internal use cases instead of novel AI-enabled products, services, and business models. In this Viewpoint, we use examples from a range of industries, exploring why companies should ensure they are positioned to seize long-term, revolutionary, and client-centric AI opportunities.
Beyond systems
Digitalization has become embedded within large businesses, with recent advances in AI accelerating the process even further. While we still need more progress, the fusion of business and IT functions is ever present, as “softwarization” of companies proceeds apace. IT functions need to recognize this pace of change and evolve toward being true strategic advisers to the business, driving innovation. In this Viewpoint, we examine some practical approaches for CIOs to bring about change.
Be careful out there
By now, business executives are well aware that using artificial intelligence (AI), especially generative AI (GenAI) such as ChatGPT, brings with it certain risks as well as benefits. Apart from the commonly cited existential risk of a future artificial general intelligence posing a threat to mankind, there are plenty of less severe but more likely risks. Those that most people have read about already are possible biases in GenAI’s outputs, as well as its propensity to “hallucinate” on occasion.
Embedding climate financing with net zero focus
One of the biggest challenges for delivering on the world’s climate change commitments is how to finance the huge costs involved. As climate-tipping points approach ever closer, there is a pressing need to embed climate change–related issues into investment and funding decision-making, both public and private. In this Viewpoint, we look at what this entails and set out some priorities for businesses, financial institutions, and government — working collaboratively — to narrow the funding gap.
Web3 & Metaverse — The rise of the new Internet & the India opportunity
Metaverse and Web3 are often used as umbrella terms for the next generation of the Internet, and the transformation they signify presents both a challenge and an opportunity for India. While some remain skeptical, we believe Metaverse and Web3 will lead the frontiers of the next wave of digital adoption for Indian industries. This Viewpoint explores the market potential of this next version of the Internet across different industries in India and gives an overview of the early use cases tested by industries in India and across the globe.
Quantum summer or winter?
There are still big uncertainties about how quantum computing (QC) will evolve — will there be a breakthrough, when might it happen, and which technologies and applications do we expect to succeed?
This Viewpoint shares the results of a Blue Shift by Arthur D. Little (ADL) survey, inviting more than 500 experts and industry executives to gauge their views on critical uncertainties and future scenarios; to draw conclusions on technology maturity, pace, and impact; and to help illustrate what this might mean for business.
The Industrial Metaverse
From good to great: Enhancing innovation performance through effective management processes
Take off or trough?
“Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.” – Niels Bohr
The Metaverse, beyond fantasy
Unleashing the business potential of quantum computing
METAVERSE - THE NEXT DIGITAL REVOLUTION FOR BUSINESS?
A revolution powered by VR has been promised for decades, but it’s only recently that improvements in hardware and software, together with a new level of consumer engagement, have started to converge to create something that could be genuinely disruptive in the foreseeable future. If you are in the business of gaming or entertainment the potential is clear, but what could the metaverse mean for the rest of the business world, and what are some of the challenges that will need to be overcome?
Unleashing innovation in IT
IT is still often seen as inflexible and costly
Digitalization has been at the top of the strategic agenda for over a decade (see Figure 1). IT assets, and the function that manages them, are usually seen as the backbone of the digitalization effort.
Appetite for disruption – Making the most of the future of food
Being the leader of a global food and beverage business has been anything but easy over recent years. Going back a decade, the industry had a reputation for being fairly stable and conservative, dominated by a limited number of global brands that delivered steady growth and margins. Since then, the industry has been shaken by a succession of disruptions, including sluggish demand for traditional core products, rapidly changing consumer patterns and preferences, accelerating technological developments, and evolving attitudes towards the environmental and social impacts of food production.
The Future of Mobility postCOVID-19 – Turning a crisis into an opportunity
Deserted city roads and empty buses and trains were among the most striking images from pandemic lockdowns around the world. However, successful cities have a gift for adapting to radically changing circumstances – how can the crisis be used to drive more sustainable, resilient, human-centric mobility systems? Based on a major research study, this article focuses on six game changers for players in the mobility ecosystem.
Artificial intelligence in mobility
Beyond the hype, where the true value lies
Strategy: How to cope with the uncertainties of tomorrow’s new world
Planning for the future has never been more difficult given the unstable and uncertain global environment that businesses face at both a macro and micro level. Based on insights from client conversations and internal experts, we outline the range of potential scenarios organizations could face, along with guidance and best practice on making strategic decisions in tomorrow’s new world.
Risk: Strengthening business resilience after COVID-19
Despite that they had invested in comprehensive crisis management planning, the spread of COVID-19 found many companies ill-prepared, even though it was a known risk with extreme consequences and a reasonable likelihood of occurring. Looking at the evidence, the authors consider the underlying causes of this poor preparedness and set out the key elements of a new business resilience approach suitable for the post- COVID-19 world.
Next-generation business resilience management
Responses from large companies to the COVID-19 crisis have brought into sharp focus serious shortcomings in current risk and business continuity management approaches, such as lack of suitable data and intelligence, inadequate appreciation of risk velocity, and not enough agility to adapt to rapidly changing situations. Well before the crisis, Arthur D. Little (ADL) pioneered and deployed a new business resilience management approach with, at its core, an innovative predictive analytics tool powered by machine-learning technology to address these shortcomings.
The Company of Tomorrow
The COVID-19 crisis hit the world as this edition of Prism was in preparation. Needless to say, the outlook for business, at least in the short term, has changed radically in just a few weeks. Nevertheless, it’s becoming increasingly clear that one effect of the crisis has been acceleration of trends that were already there, such as virtualization of the workplace, further penetration of digital technologies (for example, AI and the IoT), and “asset-light” business models that make businesses more responsive and resilient to rapid shocks.
Aviation year zero – The future is reinvention
It is clear to all that COVID-19 has dealt a devastating blow to the aviation industry. However, while the pre-crisis industry was still thriving from the waves of globalization and commoditization of travel, it was already facing threats such as environmental pressures, unbalanced profit sharing along the value chain, and multiple constraints on operational and business agility. The recovery phase will be extremely challenging, and we believe future growth will involve nothing less than reinvention of the industry.
Turning customers into subscribers – How to successfully make the shift
What customers expect from manufacturing businesses is changing, moving away from outright purchase- to subscription-based models. This offers opportunities and risks for traditional players, providing them with access to greater customer insight, but also lowering barriers for competitors. Based on case examples, this article looks at how manufacturers can make the shift to subscriptionbased businesses.
Managing clinical trials during COVID-19 and beyond
One of the many consequences of the COVID-19 crisis has been difficulty in continuing to enroll and run clinical trials, which typically involve large numbers of people interacting in multiple geographies. Arthur D. Little (ADL) has pioneered and deployed a new, risk-based predictive analytical approach, powered by machine-learning technology. It enables pharma companies to make much better predictions and forecasts to support decision-making around key issues, such as adapting patient targets to favor less affected and recovering geographies, program extensions, and new trials.
Leading businesses through the COVID-19 crisis
Leading businesses through the COVID-19 crisis
First learnings from Asia and Italy
Converging on the Future
Convergence seems to be everywhere in the business world these days. It covers a wide range of factors which can come together to change the status quo in an industry or value chain. Think of food and healthcare in functional foods, or telecoms and energy in smart grids. Digital technology has been a huge enabler of convergence.
The next generation of corporate incubators
While large organizations have enthusiastically embraced the creation of in-house corporate incubators to identify and support breakthrough growth opportunities with start-ups, the results have been disappointing for many. This article argues that to overcome these challenges and successfully scale up new opportunities, corporates have to embrace next-generation models.
Sense of Purpose
From time to time concepts that, at first sight, seem quite old fashioned suddenly get a new lease of life. For example, open innovation has been around for decades, but it’s come to the fore again in recent years in the context of converging industries, start-up collaborations and the rise of the innovation ecosystem.
Innovation purpose
Innovation is central to success for businesses today, yet many large, asset-heavy companies with decentralized business units struggle to combine R&D agility with common, clearly communicable corporate strategies. This article, based on experience at a large global energy company, explains how a purpose-driven approach to R&D can deliver innovation agility across the organization.
Can food and beverage leaders find their footing?
New growth outside the core business is at the top of the CEO agenda for many companies in mature sectors. Large food and beverage companies are in a race to increase the “rate of change,” deploying a variety of strategies to stay flexible, broaden their product portfolio, and keep their brands relevant. Traditional innovation methods of investing in internal R&D or rolling up start-ups are not rapidly creating and developing new step-out business quickly enough.
Corporate/ start-up collaboration
Why is it important for large corporations to work with start-ups?
It’s well known that businesses are being disrupted faster than ever before. Innovation launch and adoption cycles are dropping. For credit cards to reach 100 million users? 25 years. Online banking? 10 years. WhatsApp? 2 years. Candy Crush? A matter of months.
Entrepreneurial start-ups are one of the main driving forces for this acceleration. Almost 65% of Fortune 500 companies joined the list in the last 20 years.
The CEO - Lost in space and time?
Being a CEO today is a very different experience than it was even a decade ago – in the past a new CEO would know the space where their company operated and be given time to effect change. This has been transformed – space has expanded, while time has contracted dramatically. How can CEOs understand this new landscape and successfully plot courses through it?
Breakthrough Incubator
New growth outside the core business is at the top of the CEO agenda for many companies in mature sectors. Our Breakthrough Incubator service is a unique and powerful model for creating and delivering new step-out businesses. Using this approach Arthur D.
The Breakthrough Incubator
Creating a new step-out business is not easy
Achieving the revenue growth that markets expect can be challenging: growth by acquisition is expensive, and organic growth is often too slow and incremental. Therefore, a key priority for global corporations is to improve performance in breakthrough innovation to overcome the growth gap.
More About Rick
- University of BristolBSc (Hons), Mechanical Engineering
- Shell International Petroleum CompanyProject Manager, Head of Planning and Cost Engineering Netherlands (N.A.M) / Oman (Petroleum Dev Oman)