The most expensive decisions in R&D are made in the first few months of a project, yet these are precisely the months when teams have the least information to guide their choices.
You're standing at the foot of a mountain. Thick fog blankets the valley before you, obscuring most of the range. A familiar path stretches up the nearest slope. Yet somewhere in that fog, better routes may exist.
Do you start climbing the mountain you can see, or first map the range you can't?
The Mountain Range Paradox
Every week, we speak with R&D teams facing the same challenge: they must make multi-million dollar decisions with fragmentary information. Here's why this keeps happening:
- Incomplete Discovery: Teams dive into solution development, having explored only 10-20% of the possible approaches. Like climbing the first mountain you see, it's not that the path is wrong - it's that you don't know what you don't know yet.
- Misaligned Incentives: Your R&D team is tasked with exploring the future and has to convince stakeholders operating in the present. While you see the value in mapping unknown territories, budget holders need concrete deliverables. This forces teams to commit to familiar paths - not because they're optimal, but because they're easier to explain and defend.
- False Economy of Speed: We've all felt it - that pressure to "get something started." But here's the brutal truth: organisations spend more time, money and resources climbing the wrong mountain than they would have spent mapping the entire range. A month or two of proper exploration costs far less than years heading in the wrong direction.
The thing to remember is that these challenges are within our control - as R&D professionals, we can't eliminate uncertainty, but we can control how we explore it.
How Leading R&D Teams Choose the Right Mountain to Climb
Every successful R&D journey begins with a single question - but it's how you expand that question that determines where you'll end up.
Great R&D teams know that each technological challenge contains hidden dimensions.
They systematically explore these dimensions through multiple lenses: technical requirements, functional needs, and cross-industry applications. Most importantly, they recognise that the initial question often hides deeper, more fundamental challenges, and the expansion of the problem space is what separates good innovation from great innovation.
The expansion process begins with your challenge:
- Your team might be seeking new materials with specific properties.
- Or looking to improve a manufacturing process.
- Or developing the next generation of your core technology.
Your starting point – that first question – is just the beginning.
Remember These Three Principles When Mapping Your Landscape:
- Start With Function, Not Form: Your initial challenge might be about a specific material. But the real question is often about what that material needs to do. By focusing on function, you open up entire new territories for exploration. This shift in perspective can reveal solutions hiding in plain sight.
- Cross Industry Boundaries: Solutions rarely respect industry lines. What looks like a novel challenge in one field might be solved daily in another. The most valuable discoveries often come from unexpected places. This is why systematic cross-industry exploration is crucial.
- Map Before You Climb: Advanced tools and methodologies have transformed how we explore. Modern landscape mapping can be done in weeks, not months. The cost of exploration has never been lower. Yet the cost of choosing wrong has never been higher.
What mountain are you preparing to climb?
By understanding your unique challenge, we can show you how leading R&D teams would approach mapping that specific landscape.
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