Delivering Innovation Through Enhanced Collaboration

Transforming Process of R&D
With globalisation of our business environment, the nature and process of Research & Development, has changed considerably. Research centres across the globe need to integrate and work together to deliver innovations for different markets. In fact seamless collaboration between geographically dispersed areas and countries, amongst various work teams, support teams, and other stakeholders is a key success factor for complex multinational development projects. While working on a product or solution it becomes extremely important to also have good understanding of that market, to be able to provide customised solution. There are several multinational companies, whose R&D teams have been collaborating globally to drive innovations for different markets. To take the example of one of the IT leaders, IBM India, its scientists work in close collaboration across the company's world-renowned research labs. IBM Research - India has also emerged as a premier research lab in the region and is working to solve unique challenges in emerging markets such as spoken web, cleansing of noisy data, and scalable analytics platforms for the telecom industry.

Overall, India-based R&D Globalization and R&D Services market reached US$ 20 billion@ in 2015, up by 9.9 per cent over 2014. R&D Services market stood at US$ 7.76 billion and R&D Globalisation market (Captives) stood at US$ 12.25 billion. India's R&D globalisation and services market is set to almost double by 2020 to US$ 38 billion (source: IBEF)

Several multinationals are now looking at setting up R&D units in India, which is expected to work with their global units on key research projects. Ford Motor Company plans to set up a new global technology and business centre in Chennai, which will host operations of Ford Global Business Services in areas of Information Technology (IT), product engineering, finance and accounting and data analytics. Switzerland-based Ferring Holding SA, a research-driven, specialty bio-pharmaceutical company, plans to set up its R&D centre in Hyderabad at an investment of US$ 250 million. American chipmaker Broadcom is betting big on developing solutions tailored to India and other emerging nations from its Bengaluru R&D unit (source: IBEF)

Technology has enabled better collaboration
In case of research and development projects, knowledge transfer becomes very important while collaborating with different global teams, instead of just information sharing. In fact knowledge transfer, which is more about interacting to be able to take an action, requires far more than face to face interaction. Technology has enabled better collaboration with enhanced tools and better infrastructure. However we are still at a stage where collaboration is mainly limited to videoconferencing and for actual knowledge transfer to happen it needs to go beyond that. We need to look at a solution that brings together content, visual and data for a better seamless experience and deriving greater insights from different teams. We need to move from just a collaborative workspace to a visual workplace. And that's even more critical for R&D units working together on complex projects. Case in point is R&D department in a semiconductor company. They work on intricate designs and its' very difficult for teams across markets to contribute. In fact the team owning the project will be quite sceptical in sharing their research work across different teams or delegating work across different markets for fear of mishandling which can result in huge losses. A good collaborative solution can enable multiple data sources and pieces of content to be used simultaneously to make critical design changes. It can also enable cost savings by identifying flaw or problems prior to production; it can enable reduction in time required to make redesign decisions. Further design teams can achieve breakthroughs in design features with inputs from different design teams across markets. Combined inputs and efforts can result in path breaking innovation suited to the needs of the target markets.

What are the challenges for enterprises and how can it be addressed?
One of the key challenges in evolving to enhanced collaboration solution is legacy infrastructure, investments in collaboration solutions that have been made already by enterprises. No enterprise will like to disrupt the existing infrastructure and incur losses. The solution to this is quite simple. The collaboration solution providers need to look at ways to protect the current investment, which means integrating legacy infrastructure into the new unified visual workplace platform.

MNCs around the globe are now eager to exploit developing countries' markets particularly India for research and development because of the talent pool and the tremendous government support to R&D. In fact whether it is the global companies having footprint in India or the local companies who are aspiring to become global - they are all looking at bringing in innovation by leveraging the talent pool that is scattered across markets. A visual workplace solution can certainly help a great deal in this direction!