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.
The Breakthrough Incubator - how to create and rapidly launch new step-out businesses
Despite businesses focusing their efforts on improving breakthrough innovation performance, many still fail to create sustainable new businesses of scale. The Breakthrough Incubator model, a new approach built on radical collaboration across the innovation ecosystem, covering the entire process from idea to commercialization, is already demonstrating that it can overcome the challenges that hold back performance.
The Breakthrough Incubator
Achieving the revenue growth that markets expect can be challenging, especially when core business growth prospects are limited, or when disruptions or convergence mean that the company has to move into new or unfamiliar areas. Growth by acquisition is expensive, and organic growth is slow and incremental. Many CEOs today therefore look towards innovation to overcome the growth gap and most large companies have already put in place a breakthrough innovation capability to complement core R&D.
Dynamic innovation strategy
Having a clear strategy for innovation seems like an obvious priority for any large company. However, the classical “top-down” analytical approach, which starts with business objectives and cascades down perfectly through to a series of narrowly defined innovation projects, is seen by many as too rigid for the post- digital “lean start-up” world. So has innovation strategy had its day? Should companies instead just focus on capturing new opportunities and working with start-ups?
Ecosystem innovation
While companies have embraced the opportunities offered by the concept of open innovation over the past 20 years, the overriding need for agility and responsiveness means this is no longer adequate to meet future challenges. In this article, the authors explain why companies need to focus on hyper-collaboration, adopting truly outside-in philosophies at all levels, and work with wider ranges of partners with different capabilities, if they are to succeed in building agile ecosystems that drive real innovation
Embracing complexity with value-based risk management
In the current environment uncertainties seem to be everywhere, making strategic planning more difficult than ever. Many companies use enterprise risk management (ERM) as a proven framework for managing risk. However, businesses are now looking to improve their track records when it comes to understanding and overcoming unwanted events. In this article the authors explore issues related to risk management and how the 6C framework can help.
Metro Railways - A Journey of Transformation
Metro railways are critically important assets for the world's cities if we are to meet the challenges of maintaining urban mobility. For established metros, responding to the needs of the future is no easy thing.
How to create breakthroughs in nine months
The challenge of creating "breakthrough innovations" is one that many large corporations struggle with.
The Breakthrough Factory
One of the key challenges for large corporations looking to achieve “Breakthrough Innovation” is that technology-intensive businesses usually need to research deeply into science in order to find breakthroughs.The challenge is particularly daunting for mature companies. In this article the authors discuss the concept of the Breakthrough Factory as a means of maximizing the probability of Breakthrough Innovation for this type of company.
Organizing for Breakthrough Innovation
Our recent Breakthrough Innovation survey identified that having the correct organizational model for Breakthrough Innovation is one of the key ways of ensuring success. In this article the authors shed light on the various models available for achieving Breakthrough Innovation, their pros and cons, under what circumstances they are most appropriate and the major considerations to bear in mind when using them.
Systematizing Breakthrough Innovation
It is increasingly important for companies to be able to deliver a pipeline of Breakthrough (or Radical) Innovations in order to respond to emerging competition, disruptions to core business, and increasing customer power. For example, in five years’ time, companies in our survey expect the revenue contribution of Breakthrough Innovations to be double the current levels.
Anticipating the Operations of the Future
During the last decade business operations have been transformed in a way that has never been seen before. What does the future hold for operations management and how can it react to ever accelerating change? In this brief article the authors take a quick look at some of the likely characteristics of the operations of the future, and how operational leaders can best respond.
The Trends in Megatrends
The forecasting of megatrends has significantly grown in recent years. Business, societies, governments and industries are increasingly demanding insights into future developments. At the same time, intelligence providers have come up with ever more sophisticated forecasting methods. In this article the authors shed light on the most important megatrends in the areas of technology, energy & the environment, economics & politics as well as social & health and examine how companies can best go about monitoring them.
Creating the Optimal R&D Organization
Driven by the need to respond to global hyper-competition and the increasing clock speed of technological change, companies are relying heavily on their R&D functions to accelerate innovation whilst maintaining tight budgets
How to manage your return on investment in innovation
In any company around the globe investment in innovation and R&D is under critical scrutiny. Is it going to the right places and is the amount spent exactly appropiate? Is the company getting the best return on its innovation spend? These are questions that any CTO today must be able to answer. In this article the authors explore the challenges of managing the Return On Investment (ROI) of innovation, and provide some examples of good practices and key factors for success.
Capability Roadmapping – developing the means to an end
Technology roadmaps can be a powerful tool to align research and technology development activities with business aims. However, they are not so helpful when it comes to defining exactly how the company can get there. This article takes the concept of roadmapping one step further, looking at the concept of Capability Roadmapping, and how it helps define and develop the capabilities a company needs to achieve its goals. The authors explore the benefits, provide examples and show how to get the best out of Capability Roadmapping.
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.
The Breakthrough Incubator - how to create and rapidly launch new step-out businesses
Despite businesses focusing their efforts on improving breakthrough innovation performance, many still fail to create sustainable new businesses of scale. The Breakthrough Incubator model, a new approach built on radical collaboration across the innovation ecosystem, covering the entire process from idea to commercialization, is already demonstrating that it can overcome the challenges that hold back performance.
The Breakthrough Incubator
Achieving the revenue growth that markets expect can be challenging, especially when core business growth prospects are limited, or when disruptions or convergence mean that the company has to move into new or unfamiliar areas. Growth by acquisition is expensive, and organic growth is slow and incremental. Many CEOs today therefore look towards innovation to overcome the growth gap and most large companies have already put in place a breakthrough innovation capability to complement core R&D.
Dynamic innovation strategy
Having a clear strategy for innovation seems like an obvious priority for any large company. However, the classical “top-down” analytical approach, which starts with business objectives and cascades down perfectly through to a series of narrowly defined innovation projects, is seen by many as too rigid for the post- digital “lean start-up” world. So has innovation strategy had its day? Should companies instead just focus on capturing new opportunities and working with start-ups?
Ecosystem innovation
While companies have embraced the opportunities offered by the concept of open innovation over the past 20 years, the overriding need for agility and responsiveness means this is no longer adequate to meet future challenges. In this article, the authors explain why companies need to focus on hyper-collaboration, adopting truly outside-in philosophies at all levels, and work with wider ranges of partners with different capabilities, if they are to succeed in building agile ecosystems that drive real innovation
Embracing complexity with value-based risk management
In the current environment uncertainties seem to be everywhere, making strategic planning more difficult than ever. Many companies use enterprise risk management (ERM) as a proven framework for managing risk. However, businesses are now looking to improve their track records when it comes to understanding and overcoming unwanted events. In this article the authors explore issues related to risk management and how the 6C framework can help.
Metro Railways - A Journey of Transformation
Metro railways are critically important assets for the world's cities if we are to meet the challenges of maintaining urban mobility. For established metros, responding to the needs of the future is no easy thing.
How to create breakthroughs in nine months
The challenge of creating "breakthrough innovations" is one that many large corporations struggle with.
The Breakthrough Factory
One of the key challenges for large corporations looking to achieve “Breakthrough Innovation” is that technology-intensive businesses usually need to research deeply into science in order to find breakthroughs.The challenge is particularly daunting for mature companies. In this article the authors discuss the concept of the Breakthrough Factory as a means of maximizing the probability of Breakthrough Innovation for this type of company.
Organizing for Breakthrough Innovation
Our recent Breakthrough Innovation survey identified that having the correct organizational model for Breakthrough Innovation is one of the key ways of ensuring success. In this article the authors shed light on the various models available for achieving Breakthrough Innovation, their pros and cons, under what circumstances they are most appropriate and the major considerations to bear in mind when using them.
Systematizing Breakthrough Innovation
It is increasingly important for companies to be able to deliver a pipeline of Breakthrough (or Radical) Innovations in order to respond to emerging competition, disruptions to core business, and increasing customer power. For example, in five years’ time, companies in our survey expect the revenue contribution of Breakthrough Innovations to be double the current levels.
Anticipating the Operations of the Future
During the last decade business operations have been transformed in a way that has never been seen before. What does the future hold for operations management and how can it react to ever accelerating change? In this brief article the authors take a quick look at some of the likely characteristics of the operations of the future, and how operational leaders can best respond.
The Trends in Megatrends
The forecasting of megatrends has significantly grown in recent years. Business, societies, governments and industries are increasingly demanding insights into future developments. At the same time, intelligence providers have come up with ever more sophisticated forecasting methods. In this article the authors shed light on the most important megatrends in the areas of technology, energy & the environment, economics & politics as well as social & health and examine how companies can best go about monitoring them.
Creating the Optimal R&D Organization
Driven by the need to respond to global hyper-competition and the increasing clock speed of technological change, companies are relying heavily on their R&D functions to accelerate innovation whilst maintaining tight budgets
How to manage your return on investment in innovation
In any company around the globe investment in innovation and R&D is under critical scrutiny. Is it going to the right places and is the amount spent exactly appropiate? Is the company getting the best return on its innovation spend? These are questions that any CTO today must be able to answer. In this article the authors explore the challenges of managing the Return On Investment (ROI) of innovation, and provide some examples of good practices and key factors for success.
Capability Roadmapping – developing the means to an end
Technology roadmaps can be a powerful tool to align research and technology development activities with business aims. However, they are not so helpful when it comes to defining exactly how the company can get there. This article takes the concept of roadmapping one step further, looking at the concept of Capability Roadmapping, and how it helps define and develop the capabilities a company needs to achieve its goals. The authors explore the benefits, provide examples and show how to get the best out of Capability Roadmapping.
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)