The Challenger Sale

parts of the strategy are based on false or questionable premises.
Challenging
these ideas and coming back to the business with a superior
alternative will generate significant improvements to the company.”
R&D is also an area where questioning assumptions and deeply held
beliefs is of paramount importance, lest the organization end up blindsided
by unseen risks or be held captive by its own biases. To help them emerge
successfully from the current wobbly economy, companies are looking for
“transformational innovation” from their R&D groups—in other words,

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they’re looking to feed the front end of the innovation pipeline. The payoff
for getting this right is huge for a company: Collegues from our Innovation
& Strategy practice found that R&D organizations that excel at seeding the
growth portfolio with transformational ideas generate 
double
the new
product sales relative to peers. In addition, transformational ideas have
development cycles that are 11 percent faster than their competitors’, since
ideas that are well scoped and connected to market needs require less
rework.
Our colleagues found that of all of the competencies for an R&D
department to possess, “strategic influence”—that is, the ability of R&D to
influence corporate and business strategies—delivered the greatest return in
terms of enabling these transformational ideas. At the same time, nearly 70
percent of R&D heads our company surveyed reported that their teams
lacked this important capability.
The issue here, for most organizations, is that the front end of the
innovation funnel is where many good ideas go to die. Companies, it turns
out, frequently miss out on transformational innovations due to R&D’s
inability to convince business partners of an idea’s merit. The reason so few
ideas are successful in the market is often because R&D scopes out good
ideas, fails to convince the business of the relevance of ideas, or is unable to
connect ideas to market needs.
In response, CEB has pulled together a series of best practices—not
unlike what we’ve delivered in support of the Challenger Selling Model.
The practices they’ve been out teaching their members have to do with new
ways of arming the R&D team to challenge the entrenched assumptions of
the business, avoid knee-jerk rejection of new opportunities, and compress
the time it takes to collect feedback on early-stage ideas.