Where's the best place to stand if the world is flat? Put another way, what is your defensible position in business if globalisation is reducing the differentiating value of designing things, making things, offering services, having knowledge or even being able to access enormous intellectual firepower?

It's an abstract issue that was brought sharply into focus by Thomas Friedmans book “The World is Flat”. You don't have to agree with every breathless word of Friedman's analysis to recognise that it has a core of truth. The things that gave Western economies their early advantages, such as access to capital and resources and the education and inventiveness of their workforces, are now more widely distributed than ever before. So the question is: what skills and resources should Western companies acquire in order to remain competitive in a world where just knowing things or being able to manipulate resources is not enough?

Professor Bruce Tether, research director of Design-London, talks about stickiness as one way of creating a defensible business position, in our feature on service innovation.

He argues that the deep understanding of how local markets value and use goods and services is a form of tacit knowledge that is very difficult for outsiders to replicate. The term stickiness is used to imply the ability of such tacit knowledge to bind value creation to a particular place or organisation.

Communicate and collaborate

There may be an easier way to bind value creation to your organisation, and one with which EIRMA can help. If invention, manufacturing and service skills are all becoming very widely distributed, there's an argument for organising a business to be the world's best orchestrator of those largely undifferentiated skills. It's what Procter & Gamble did when they inverted their R&D strategy, exchanging “not invented here” for “proudly found elsewhere”, and in the process substantially boosting the proportion of their sales made from new products with relatively high margins.

For more than 40 years EIRMA has provided a forum in which senior R&D managers from all sectors can meet and talk openly, helping each other with the kinds of insight and advice that are hard to find elsewhere in an increasingly competitive world. EIRMA also equips young R&D managers for the flat world, by running events that help them become the orchestrators of tomorrow's businesses. These events help them develop the communication and collaboration skills that will be vital to a future in which their functional skills may be less important than their ability to get others to work together.

The first of these events is an annual three-day management study group, which helps young managers who are just taking on significant new line or project responsibilities with wide supervisory and co-ordination responsibilities. The three days are filled with lectures, business simulations, presentations and joint tasks that provide opportunities for practising the communication, collaboration and leadership skills that will be vital for the success of these young managers and the businesses they end up running.

EIRMA also invites a group of young managers to participate in a taskforce that meets several times over six months to analyse an issue in R&D management and present recommendations at the Association's annual conference. This taskforce is a particularly useful way of training young managers in collaboration and communications, since it mimics the way that modern business happens. The taskforce members meet at irregular intervals, in time squeezed out of their normal schedules. Work that was begun face-to-face is continued remotely by phone and email. People of many nationalities and industrial sectors have to develop very efficient interpersonal and group communication skills very quickly. Leadership shifts rapidly from person to person as the group focuses on various aspects of the task. A lot has to be taken on trust for the group to succeed.

The user experience

David Lever, a business development manager at Rio Tinto Minerals in Guildford, has participated in EIRMA's management study group and was a member of the 2006 young managers' taskforce, which considered Europe's future in a world of global R&D for a presentation at that year's annual conference.

Lever's role at Rio Tinto makes him responsible for developing new applications for the company's products, by assessing the technical and economic feasibility of the projects and managing their progress through a Stage-Gate® process. This means Lever has to manage multiple forms of collaboration, including between the company's R&D, commercial, health and safety and environmental groups, as well as with potential customers and collaborators in the EU, North America and beyond. Lever also has to co-ordinate work between his own part of Rio Tinto, other group companies, external technical institutes, universities and other research organisations.

He says his involvement with EIRMA activities has broadened his awareness of R&D management trends, and enabled him to understand which of these is currently regarded as best practice. It has also led to longer-term networking with other young R&D managers from across a number of sectors. Lever is still in contact with some of his fellow taskforce members, and organised an independent workshop to bring some of them back together in December 2006.

Olivier Gergelé is R&D section head for Procter & Gamble's Latin American fabric-care operation, where he is responsible for the product development and innovation programs of Ace and Rindex, two key regional brands. His job is to grow these brands by developing improved versions of the detergents that better meet consumer needs. He also has a global responsibility within the Tide detergent franchise, leading some of the company's biggest global laundry projects.

Gergelé works in P&G's R&D products research operation, which brings together consumer, technology and marketing considerations in one place. One of his key responsibilities is to ensure that each of these P&G capabilities and functions are properly integrated through the product development process. To do so, he supervises a team of 12 people (senior scientists, engineers and researchers) in Latin America, as well as managing people in technical centres world-wide as part of his global responsibilities.

Gergelé took part in EIRMA's 2005 young managers' taskforce, exploring the issues surrounding bringing ideas successfully to market. The team developed a set of principles for successful innovation that it presented during the annual conference in May that year. The team looked at ways to discover unknown needs, outlined how a simple and relevant innovation strategy could make a difference, and finally how overcoming internal communication barriers is critical to make innovation a reality.

“Joining this taskforce was a great opportunity to meet other young people and senior managers working in totally different areas, and to talk with them about issues and opportunities in the field of innovation,” said Gergelé. “I was also exposed to different innovation models and strategies from other categories, which I found to be a very enriching experience”.

He says that being a part of the taskforce helped him sharpen some of his thinking skills, as well as making him consider subjects that are easily overlooked but which can help young managers become more efficient and mature in their daily work. Gergelé also valued his exposure to senior management, seeing the opportunity to work on the issues they care about as good preparation for a future, more senior role.

Unlike Lever's group, Gergelé's taskforce colleagues haven't met again since they worked together on their EIRMA project. But he sees this as an opportunity, suggesting meetings with the team and senior managers to do follow-up work on the theme they studied, as well as analysing how their learning has been applied in the workplace. He also suggests that one year's taskforce should help set up the next, to share their experiences and develop its relevance. Finally he says the follow-up meetings could also be used to develop case studies on innovation best practice.

Would Gergelé recommend the taskforce to young managers in similar roles to his own?

“I would highly recommend pursuing the taskforce idea, making sure each company brings their top talent”, he said. “This will help create a more balanced EIRMA community as well as helping create a good network for these young managers. The more young managers get involved with EIRMA, the easier it will be to tailor a program fitting this community.”

Reflecting today's rapid pace of change, Gergelé also suggests that EIRMA organises two-day forums with participation from equal numbers of young and senior managers.

“This would allow young managers to learn a lot about the positions they may take in a few years, he said. Since the world is changing so fast, it would also enable top management to get an update on the expectations and motivations of today's young managers.”

If the future of successful innovation management is as much to do with collaboration and communication as it is with narrow functional skills, Gergelé's point is well made. Tomorrow's most successful innovation managers will have to ensure that they have the skills to work with people of different ages and levels of management seniority. After all, you can't be a good conductor if you can't get parts of the orchestra to play for you.