Tiger Buford, an orthopedic engineer with 30 years in product development, lays out eight red flags that mean your R&D leader is failing: no innovation, a thin pipeline, too much sustaining work, risk aversion, lack of diversity, too many projects at once, poor collaboration with regulatory and sales, and distance from surgeons and hospitals.
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Brought to you by Tiger Buford. Hello, orthopedic friends. Welcome to Inside Orthopedics. My name is Tiger. I'm an orthopedic industry insider and retained recruiter for early orthopedic companies. Thanks for listening. This is episode number 8. The title is "Why You Should Fire Your R&D Leader." Let's get right into it. So my background is engineering. I worked in product development and orthopedics for 3 decades. I know R&D. I've been really lucky to experience world-class R&D, but I've also seen very ineffective R&D. So let's talk about the problem R&D. Usually the R&D problem can be traced to the R&D leader. Based on my experience, I've seen several red flags to look for in R&D leadership, and I can think of 8 specific red flags to look for if you're a CEO. So if you're a CEO of an orthopedic company, you can detect these 8 flaws that you should consider in making a change to your R&D leadership. So I'm going to go over 8 red flags right now. Red flag number 1 is a lack of innovation. Pretty easy to see. You're not getting real product innovation from your R&D group. If your products start to look like variations of your competitors, and meanwhile your competitors are doing remarkable things, then maybe, maybe you've got a problem with lack of innovation from the leadership. Red flag number 2: a thin pipeline. So your product pipeline is thin. As you know, successful orthopedic companies usually win with a steady flow of new products. New products are the engine of any company that fuels the sales force, and a thin pipeline will ultimately kill your company. So red flag 2 is a thin pipeline. Red flag number 3 is heavy sustaining engineering work. So this one's a little harder to see. If your head of R&D is constantly fixing or redesigning products that have been launched already, then you may not know it, but the majority of your R&D budget is probably being spent on maintenance. If it feels like there's a disproportionate amount of money spent on maintenance, then just check it out. It's easy to figure out the numbers. So that's red flag number 3. Red flag number 4 is risk adversity. The R&D team is just not thinking differently enough or out of the box enough. Your head of R&D is probably not giving your engineers room to experiment and make mistakes. When your R&D leader demands that the engineers get it right the first time, unknowingly he or she is biasing the engineers to focus on the least risky solution, and this leads to no risk-taking at all. So that's number 4. Number 5, red flag number 5, is a lack of diversity. You see this one a lot. If your head of R&D hires like-minded engineers from the same background or school, this can be a problem. The result is there's just not enough diversity of industry backgrounds, project experiences, engineering, or engineering disciplines on your R&D team. For more depth in this area, read my Mingle article. Just Google the phrase, "If you want a big breakthrough, mingle different technologies." So that's number 5. Red flag number 6 is poor focus. Your head of R&D is carrying too many projects. This is a really common mistake. Most R&D leaders do not want to give up on the more interesting back-burner projects, so they have engineers working on side projects forever that never reach commercialization. What I found is that less projects equals more focus, which equals more speed and a better pipeline. So number 6 is poor focus. Red flag number 7 is poor collaboration. If your R&D team is not playing well with other key departments such as regulatory, marketing, or sales, this is a big problem. Infighting between R&D and these other departments will kill innovation. Every time. And finally, red flag number 8 is customer distance. Your R&D team is just not plugged into the customer, the end user, the surgeon, the hospital. Unfortunately, many R&D leaders hold their teams back by not allowing them to travel. They think they're more productive in the office. This is not the case. This will stifle innovation. R&D engineers should be in surgeries every week. That's my opinion, period. So those are the 8 red flags to look for if you're a CEO. If you see a few of these, then it's time for a new R&D leader. That's it. Thanks for your time. Follow me on TigerBuford.com or Twitter @TigerBuford. Don't forget to subscribe. Be safe out there.
