Managing collaborative R&D projects

Multi-company research and development projects provide a range of new challenges for the engineering manager. It combines the management of ideas with the more traditional management concerns of time, budgets, people and resources. R&D demands creativity, and R&D managers must have an element of team coach as well as team manager in their make up. Furthermore, the success of RandD depends not just on the results it produces but also on whether these results are taken up and exploited to the benefit of the wider organisation. The R&D manager therefore has to be something of a salesman and promoter of technology transfer. R&D is seen as expensive and high risk, and increasingly companies join in multi-company collaborative projects to share the costs and risks, to acquire skills or capabilities which they do not themselves possess, or, more cynically, just because funding bodies commonly require collaboration as a condition for providing a grant. A company may also choose to enter a consortium for marketing reasons or in order to establish a strategic relationship with one or more of the other members of the consortium. This article outlines some of these challenges and indicates approaches to tackling them.