Visionary Leadership: Five R&D Tips for CEOs

Research and development (R&D) is a fundamental endeavor in my field of industrial design, where, as CEO of a firm, I guide concepts through several rounds of investigative evolution before a viable product can be created. As a CEO, you are in a unique position to also leverage the potential of R&D, which contains wisdom that is highly translatable to every field.

CEOs face behemoth pressure in acting as the guiding light for their companies. The sheer quantity and weight of their responsibilities often obfuscate the most important aspect of their unique position: maintaining the vision and tenacity needed to lead a company to achieve great wealth. Unless a CEO is committed to leveraging R&D to increase sales strategically, progress and innovation cannot be achieved.

As a creative problem-solving expert and the author of two treatises on creativity, I have created an R&D methodology that draws upon a successful four decades of invention, hundreds of patents, and collaboration with companies such as Bausch + Lomb, Mercedes-Benz, and Apple. Below, I offer five tips about how to ensure the R&D process achieves wealth and stability for your company.

Tip 1: Invest heavily in R&D through both monetary involvement and commitment to critical thinking

I grew up five houses down from Steve Jobs on Crist Drive in Los Altos, my father once joking, in peak irony, that our neighbor was a hippie who would amount to nothing—but that’s a story for another time. When Steve was ousted from Apple, stock plummeted, and he was summoned back to lead the company in innovation that provided a level of creative energy and monetary success never experienced before.

This level of innovation was achievable only through a commitment to the critical thinking that the R&D process demands. In my books Conquering the Chaos of Creativity and Inspirations of Creativity, I delineate some of the best methods for building critical thought, such as the technique of problem statement identification, that can enable your company to build a personalized methodology for problem-solving.

Tip 2: After establishing an R&D process, create a cadence of innovation that is renewed at least twice a year

Demographics, branding, and publicity—subsets of R&D that directly inform innovation—are essential for market success. To achieve increased wealth, these disciplines must become one integrated ecology in your company. Within this integrated ecology, there will be periods of renewal much like there are seasons in nature. Several concepts within CCC and Inspirations speak to this, such as the concepts of creative belief, explore and refine, and creativity inertia. As a CEO, you are responsible for learning about and harnessing these and other such principles to ensure continual renewal within R&D that can drive significant profits.

Tip 3: Within and outside of R&D, ensure you are positioned not just as a leader, but also as a visionary

Having worked with key leaders in business such as Bill Gates, I am acutely sensitive to the idea that lasting innovation always trickles down from the top. The importance of this point cannot be overstated.

       A strong leader must employ aspects of my pinnacle vision concept in order to drive success, inherently using my concept of suspending disbelief as he or she does so. With this point existing in a constant state of evolution, the R&D process will be informed greatly, ensuring success in both the short and long term.

Tip 4: Utilize support in areas where support is necessary

As visionaries, CEOs need people beside them who can lead aspects of the company to which their expertise does not extend; this is crucial because you must have free reign to direct all efforts with the right vision. Multidisciplinary vision convergence is a concept I discuss at length in CCC and Inspirations; mastery in this and related areas will allow you to yield responsibilities if and when necessary within and beyond R&D in order to sustain maximum vision.

Tip 5: Specifically, develop a tight-knit team with great capability within your tech department(s)

My methodical intuition technique, described in both my books, is one that can be established within an employee base in an appropriately methodical way so as to generate heightened awareness about all aspects of the problems that need to be solved.

Regardless of the nature of your enterprise, technology is a perfect place to direct R&D strategy with methodical vision because of advancing societal trends. Combining methodical intuition with my concept of future vision can serve as an especially powerful catalyst for change.

CEOs can uniquely leverage R&D in order to generate greater wealth on the cutting edge of innovation. Action must always be informed by the current and future sociology of the marketplace, driven, first and foremost, by an R&D-oriented focus on the unmet needs of humanity that will always pave a path to greater wealth. With adherence to the tips above, CEOs can create seismic waves of change that will shape the landscape of business for years to come.

Written by Doug Patton.

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