10th Edition
R&D Controlling and Performance Management
Improve Decision-Making with Latest R&D Performance Techniques and Maximize your Business Impact
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What challenges and successes have you encountered in R&D portfolio valuation?
Mattia: “With the transformation in our industry the challenge is how to prioritise against different segments. It is not easy to predict which will ultimately be the preferred one. This will be down to a combination of consumer acceptance, regulation and the different focus areas of competitors.
It is also not easy to invest in technology due to the high rate of intellectual property or IP in the industry. Our aim is to find technologies delivering against consumer expectations that are free from IP.”
Manoj: “A clear challenge for us has been getting the business, including marketing colleagues, to be comfortable in estimating value to our innovation projects at an early stage of discovery or development. Knowing the future value of our development pipeline enables effective prioritisation of these projects in line with our strategy.
“However, as we are transitioning from a short-to-mid-term pipeline to include a longer one, a success has been to remove the pressures of marketing alone estimating the future value. We’ve empowered our Insights and Finance teams to provide valuations by considering information from R&D and combining this data with considerations such as the regulatory landscape to estimate future value.”
What strategies do you use to eliminate delays and bottlenecks between research, development and commercial phases?
Mattia: “We operate in agile way for key projects. We empower a small cross-functional team to take decision and use design thinking, lean start up and scrum approaches. They identify bottlenecks, look at options based on consumer focus or product definition and aim to remove risk. Activities proceed in parallel based on risk versus sequential.”
In your experience, how can performance measurement and robust governance improve project excellence?
Mattia: “I think it is key to have clear project criteria connected to the intended benefits for customers and consumers. The challenge is to ensure that benefits are truly validated through skin-in-the-game assessment, moving from merely asking opinion to actual consumer or customer involvement.
You must also have clear, key metrics on product features and their targeted value.”
What is more crucial about performance measurement in R&D is how you track the value created within a year, when the value of projects could be in several years, especially in the pharmaceutical domain. It’s thus very key to set the right KPI for R&D performance, on top of R&D expenditures and project milestones tracking.
Manoj: “For me it’s about having clear performance measurement for all key criteria, from timings through to design quality attributes. With clear targets and a ‘minimum-to-go’ providing clear direction for the project team to focus their development. “Governance is the gate keeper ensuring projects are held accountable to justify if activity should continue if any there’s any sizeable deviation from the project ‘guardrails’. This enables non-bias decision making and the ability to pivot resource and investment to more beneficial projects for the business’s strategy.
“Also having performance analysis from previous projects enables the identification of improvements to future project setup, process as well as strategy.”
How do you balance the pursuit of long-term innovation with short-term performance goals when allocating resources?
Mattia: “It is key to have a long-term vision on what we are trying to achieve at company and brand level. This ensures any initiative is an improvement on the previous one and supports the organisation’s end goal.
“In the case of Imperial Brands our purpose is ‘Forging a path to a healthier future for moments of relaxation and pleasure’. Delivering that healthier future is driving the direction of our product initiatives.
“We are allocating part of our resources on short-term pipelines while looking at technologies and improvements for the longer term. R&D and Innovation is a relatively new function at Imperial, so we are just moving beyond only having two-year cycles. But we have created a long-term view of what we want to achieve, so our short-term activities are also working towards that purpose of a healthier future.”
Manoj: “It's about having a clear long-term vision and strategy that can be distilled to bitesize or stepping stones in short-term deliverables that the business is objectivised to deliver on, as well as delivering overall short-term goals.
“Having these objectives aligned across the key functions in the business will ensure resources are allocated to achieve this top-down balance between long-term and short-term. It also ensures prioritisation discussions are not had at the lower levels of the business where the focus should be to get the detailed work done.
“They are made with the right-level decision makers within a smaller cross-functional group. Cross functional is important as R&D by nature will want to develop interesting innovations for the future, while Sales and Marketing want immediate impact on profit & loss.
Ahead of the 10th Edition R&D Controlling and Performance Management conference we spoke with Mattia De Dominicis, SVP Innovation and R&D and Manoj Mistry, Head of Innovation Process & Operation at Imperial Brands, UK.
11-13 March, 2024
Vienna, Austria
Mattia and Manoj will be presenting a case study during day one of the 10th Edition R&D Controlling and Performance Management conference!
Case Study: Product Development Transformation from Renovation to Innovation focus, enabled by Consumer Centricity & Agility
- Introduction of Ideation to Launch(I2L) stage gate process.
- Implementing agility for key innovations in I2L process.
- Metrics for success and transparency.
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An interview with Mattia De Dominicis and Manoj Mistry from Imperial Brands, UK
Based on your experience what strategies or methods have proven effective in complex and faster-changing environments?
Mattia: “First is consumer centricity during product development and using consumer co-creation.
“Also having a strong partnership ecosystem so we can collaborate and tap into relevant, specialist resources. It’s also important to have the right data and a risk decision-based approach.
Importantly, you also need to look at your organisation’s values and end mission. This is key to filter ideas.”
In what ways have your firm enhanced real-time reporting and analysis for immediate adjustments and improvements?
Mattia: We have clear communication, stakeholder management and can call for meetings at any time depending on urgency. Data availability and analytics is still an opportunity for us to improve, it is a focus area.”.
Manoj: We are increasingly having more data at our fingertips and understand the importance of harnessing this to our benefit, much like all companies are doing. We are transitioning towards real-time reporting and analysis by developing our R&D foundational data capabilities. In parallel we are building towards a single source of truth for our developments and projects to drive business-wide access to real-time analysis for faster data-driven decisions.
Mattia has a successful track record in R&D, leading innovation, product development, launch and roll out of consumer good products in Household, Personal Care, Beverages and Medical Devices. He lived and worked in Italy, US, UK, South Africa, France and Germany having experience in inspiring multicultural teams to outperform through new vision.
Manoj is highly experienced working in diverse and multicultural environments across the globe. He successfully project managed and steered portfolio of product development projects with multi-million pound budgets, utilising waterfall and agile methodologies. He embedded new product development process and governance with focus on agility and consumer centricity.
