In today's fast-paced innovation environment, research and development departments often face similar challenges across different departments. Especially in the knowledge-intensive R&D environment this leads to a significant amount of time and resources being wasted on reinventing the wheel. In this blog, I want to share four Findest’s insights from collaborating with R&D teams and shed light on two strategies to foster knowledge reuse within the R&D organization, ultimately aimed at innovation success!
Insight 1: Teams solve the same problems
Obviously, when different teams are working with similar materials or technologies, they are likely to encounter similar challenges. However, without effective knowledge sharing mechanisms in place, these departments may remain unaware of each other's experiences.
Insight 2: Central Knowledge management cannot account for all contexts and workflows
For decades, organisations have been adopting cross-departmental knowledge management solutions. Yet, these efforts mostly operate on an organisational level, failing to encompass the wide array of contexts, workflows, and contents that are true for the R&D organisation.
Insight 3: There is a (very) short concentration span for internal search
Though the internal search tools are in place, people often have a limited attention span when it comes to searching for information internally. Interestingly, they tend to invest more time and effort in searching externally.
Insight 4: Knowledge can come from small-scale projects, prototypes, and experiments
Reinventing the wheel is not limited to large-scale projects. Valuable insights can also be gained from smaller insights from experiments, reviewed literature and evaluated technology. From these insights R&D professionals can derive what was done and who was involved. Knowing that certain materials have already been reviewed may save thousands and you can immediately be used and build upon.
Strategy 1: Making people unconsciously aware of existing knowledge
Encouraging employees to search internally for solutions requires a behavioural change, which can be challenging to accomplish (see insight 3). To address this, organisations can implement knowledge management systems that make it easier for employees to access and contribute to a centralised repository of information. By integrating these systems into daily workflows and search routines people can be made aware of knowledge known to the organisation without them actively searching for it.
Strategy 2: Document while working helped by AI
Documenting work and findings may not be everyone's favourite activity, as it requires discipline and time. However, it is an essential practice that organisations request from their employees for good reasons. With the recent advancements in generative AI, the process of documenting progress can now happen simultaneously with daily work. By inputting your thoughts, notes, and highlights, the AI can efficiently follow your tracks and take on the tedious task of writing and synthesising, leaving you with more energy to focus on the heavy lifting.
Talk to one of our experts about how you can prevent reinventing the wheel in your organisation!
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