Proudly Serving Illinois

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Illinois Research and Development

Fund Research to Improve Humanity

Who doesn't enjoy seeing research which broadens the thought of what is possible to a reality?  Most of us do.  From linear colliders like Cern to power generation to health accomplishments we all reap the benefits of the hard work and dedication of individuals in research.

Illinois Customers

Some information I know about Illinois is I believe the state was admitted or ratified to the United States around or about 'December 3, 1876'.  Illinois is located around latitude '40' and longitude of '-89' and has a population of roughly '12,812,508 million'.  If I remember correctly the capital is 'Springfield' and the largest city is 'Chicago'. 

What are the Three Types of R&D?

1. Basic Research
2. Applied Research
3. Experimental Development

What is Considered in R&D?

Research and development, also known as R&D, is the process by which a company works to generate new knowledge that it might use to create new technology, products, services, or systems that it will either use or sell.

What are the Four Pillars of R&D?

1. Capability
2. Optimal Methodology
3. Appropriate Design
4. Process or Product Improvement

If at any point you decide to reach to me just know the area codes I am familiar with for Illinois are '217, 224, 309, 312, 331, 618, 630, 708, 773, 779, 815, 847, 872'.  For Research assistance you will find my rates very reasonable for Illinois.  Now just keep in mind my time zone is 'Eastern Standard Time (EST)' and I know the time zones in Illinois are 'Central Standard Time (CST)' in case you wish to call me.  Anyway let me continue.

What are Some Challenges of R&D?

By leveraging hands-on research capabilities and computational science and engineering companies can produce science-based computational tools to accelerate technology maturation and confront some of the most difficult energy challenges.  Some of these challenges around green house gases for example include:

1. Capturing, utilizing, and storing greenhouse gas emissions
2. Improving the efficiency and reliability for a broad range of advanced energy systems
3. Accelerating the development of materials for service in extreme environments
4. Enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of field-scale carbon storage and unconventional oil and gas operations
5. Preventing offshore incidents by managing and minimizing risks associated with drilling and production operations, aging infrastructure, and infrastructure reuse, Metocean models, geohazard and seafloor stability research, and the intersection with engineered components for energy production, characterization, and storage.
6. Addressing energy production, transportation, and storage infrastructure

What is an Example R&D Strategy?

In my experience, the age of the insular R&D organization is over.  To serve as a company's innovation engine, R&D strategy needs to be equipped for today's fast-moving world.

You know, I don't make it out to Illinois much but I would like to see the 'Cardinal' state bird.  I am a little familiar with the Illinois 'Native violet' state flower as well.  However, I do not know much about Illinois's state tree the 'White Oak'.  Fishing is fun to me perhaps I would like reeling in the Illinois 'Bluegill' state fish.  Anyway, sorry I went off topic.  Let me continue.

How does one Overcome Barriers in R&D?

The first step to building an R&D strategy is to understand the four main challenges that modern R&D organizations face:

1. Innovation cycles are accelerating.  The growing reliance on software and the availability of simulation and automation technologies have caused the cost of experimentation to plummet while raising R&D throughput.  The pace of corporate innovation is further spurred by the increasing emergence of broadly applicable technologies, such as digital and biotech, from outside the walls of leading industry players.
2. But incumbent corporations are only one part of the equation.  The trillion dollars a year that companies spend on R&D is matched by the public sector.  Well-funded start-ups, meanwhile, are developing and rapidly scaling innovations that often threaten to upset established business models or steer industry growth into new areas.  Add increasing investor scrutiny of research spending, and the result is rising pressure on R&D leaders to quickly show results for their efforts.
3. R&D lacks connection to the customer.  The R&D group tends to be isolated from the rest of the organization.  The complexity of its activities and its specialized lexicon make it difficult for others to understand what the R&D function really does.  That sense of working inside a "black box" often exists even within the R&D organization.  During a meeting of one large company's R&D leaders, a significant portion of the discussion focused on simply getting everyone up to speed on what the various divisions were doing, let alone connecting those efforts to the company's broader goals.
4. Given the challenges R&D faces in collaborating with other functions, going one step further and connecting with customers becomes all the more difficult.  While many organizations pay lip service to customer-centric development, their R&D groups rarely get the opportunity to test products directly with end users.  This frequently results in market-back product development that relies on a game of telephone via many intermediaries about what the customers want and need.
5. Projects have few accountability metrics.  R&D groups in most sectors lack effective mechanisms to measure and communicate progress; the pharmaceutical industry, with its standard pipeline for new therapeutics that provides well-understood metrics of progress and valuation implications, is the exception, not the rule.  When failure is explained away as experimentation and success is described in terms of patents, rather than profits, corporate leaders find it hard to quantify R&D's contribution.
6. Yet proven metrics exist to effectively measure progress and outcomes.  A common challenge we observe at R&D organizations, ranging from automotive to chemical companies, is how to value the contribution of a single component that is a building block of multiple products.  One specialty-chemicals company faced this challenge in determining the value of an ingredient it used in its complex formulations.  It created categorizations to help develop initial business cases and enable long-term tracking.  This allowed pragmatic investment decisions at the start of projects and helped determine the value created after their completion.
7. Even with outcomes clearly measured, the often-lengthy period between initial investment and finished product can obscure the R&D organization's performance.  Yet, this too can be effectively managed by tracking the overall value and development progress of the pipeline so that the organization can react and, potentially, promptly reorient both the portfolio and individual projects within it.
8. Incremental projects get priority.  Our research indicates that incremental projects account for more than half of an average company's R&D investment, even though bold bets and aggressive reallocation of the innovation portfolio deliver higher rates of success.  Organizations tend to favor "safe" projects with near-term returns - such as those emerging out of customer requests - that in many cases do little more than maintain existing market share.  One consumer-goods company, for example, divided the R&D budget among its business units, whose leaders then used the money to meet their short-term targets rather than the company's longer-term differentiation and growth objectives.
9. Focusing innovation solely around the core business may enable a company to coast for a while - until the industry suddenly passes it by.  A mindset that views risk as something to be avoided rather than managed can be unwittingly reinforced by how the business case is measured.  Transformational projects at one company faced a higher internal-rate-of-return hurdle than incremental R&D, even after the probability of success had been factored into their valuation, reducing their chances of securing funding and tilting the pipeline toward initiatives close to the core.
10. As organizations mature, innovation-driven growth becomes increasingly important, as their traditional means of organic growth, such as geographic expansion and entry into untapped market segments, diminish.  To succeed, they need to develop R&D strategies equipped for the modern era that treat R&D not as a cost center but as the growth engine it can become.