Ganesh Seth, Technology Manager
The Problem I’ve seen two people, Brian Johnson and Jennifer Smith, both former heads of R&D and both respected colleagues at the time, leave R&D and then turn around and slash our budgets. What choice do we have except to protect our own? The Solution Don’t cut budgets.We are on the verge of some incredible innovations that will give us a real competitive edge. Competitors We really don’t have competition in the military market. Commercial is more competitive. But that is more of a Marketing issue. They don’t know how to position and sell our technology as a competitive advantage. Budget Cuts Our scientists are giving us a lot of flak. Some good long- term projects have lost their funding. I’ve tried to be fair to everyone in the lab and make sure we have a balanced product pipeline. Commercial Development We are addressing some of the issues that Marketing thinks we have. James Clarke works around the clock on it. And we have moved significant resources into commercial product development, including a few of our best engineers.
Your Role I work with the researchers in the lab. They come to me with their ideas and suggestions and I build business cases. From there, resources are allocated. Scott Bell For over 10 years, Scott and I haveworked closely together; in fact we even have a couple of joint research projects under way. Scott has done a lot for this lab and is doing his best to ensure that R&D doesn’t get jerked around. Allocating Resources Just before Jennifer Smith left R&D, she brought in two design engineers into the department to work on a commercial research project. In my role, I reassigned those engineers to ‘Genesis’ … an exciting new basic research project.
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