November 11, 2008 "Benchmarking for Insight on R&D Productivity" Martha Matteo in an interactive online webinar from the US.
Martha Matteo is the immediate past president of SCIP. SCIA and SCIP will collaborate with this interactive online session to be presented to the SCIA event participants in Zurich and a global online audience.
Dr. Martha Matteo is the Immediate Past President of the Board of Directors of the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP).
At Boehringer she served as Director of CTI, Director of Knowledge Management and R&D Planning. At SCIP Martha was elected to the SCIP BofD for term beginning January, 2005 and she was elected (by the BofD) as VP of the BofD and Chair of the Competitive Intelligence Foundation's Board of Trustees.
In January 2007 Martha became President of the board of Directors. A Recipient of the Catalyst Award, 2006 Martha was at the New York Academy of Sciences as Governor at Large, 1992-94, chaired the Biochemical Pharmacology Discussion Group, 1989-1994, co-chaired and chaired the Biochemistry Section in the late '80s as well as elected Fellow of the NYAS. Martha also was awarded the 2007 Lifetime Achievement Award from Frost & Sullivan.
Where
Restaurant Au Premier (within Zurich Main Railway Station). See SCIA events flyer 2008. And online as a SCIP Webinar.
What
Welcome drink from 6:30 PM, followed by an introduction of the event and the speaker by the SCIA president Kurt Kobel. In case you can not participate in the session at the SCIA venue in Zurich and want to use the Webinar format instead you can find registration information at the SCIP events page.
Dr. Matteo will present a practitioner's view of benchmarking as a useful tool to reveal options, for improving productivity, through targeted analysis of relevant comparator companies. Two points will be illustrated through case studies, drawn from the R&D environment but generalized for broader business value.
1) When is benchmarking appropriate? Examples will include support of decisions involving strategy, organizational re-structuring and internal process design.
2) Selection of sources appropriate to the question is critical. Sources can range from publicly available information and interviews with industry analysts all the way to formal interviews with comparator companies, based upon pre-approved and legally vetted interview questions. How do you decide?
Note: this presentation is based upon an article that appeared in Competitive Intelligence Magazine: Vol. 8, Number 3 (May-June, 2005).
How
The event in Zurich is free of charge for SCIA members. Non-members are welcome to join at a fee of CHF 50. The Webinar, for remote participants, will be offered at regular SCIP Webinar conditions to the global audience.
Material
As a SCIA member you can download presented slides and accompanying material to our events including this events materials.
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Reader Comments (1)
The new event format tested by SCIA, a combination of SCIP's webinar with a speaker presenting from the US and a group of CI professionals conducting an actual physical meeting, proofed to be valuable by account of the interviewed SCIA members following the event. Technology and sequence will need some improvement but SCIA always operates with the philosophy: "All big things started small once".
The cases presented by Martha in this online presentation demonstrated impressively how benchmarking can be utilized in the real business world to tackle different areas and support different decision makers and decision processes.
The several approaches to benchmarking as well as the several concepts that revealed important insights, untapped decision potential and new territory in terms of the decision process were intriguing in their presented depth as well as the logical build-up from start (questions) to finish (results and learnings).
Exploring various companies' organizational structures was broken down into operational detail so the viewer could understand the steps required to craft a template, fill it with life and work towards conclusions in comparing three major competitors to the own situation.
Optimization of global application of a maturing technology is a noble cause. Martha's example demonstrated the value of profound insights to support such a decision. Here as well a data collection strategy was explained as well the organization of the data itself. By comparing resulting options the decision makers were enabled to adopt best practice and modify key processes to best fit.
In the third case benchmarking was used to determine the own development strategy in comparison to a competitive sample. In visualizing development state and impact of the sample group's development strategies the internal client re-visited and revamped the operational momentum of the own development planning activity.
In summary of this great presentation Martha lined out some of the major benefits of benchmarking:
- Understand processes, drivers for change
- Identify “best practice” and trends, within/cross industry (where relevant)
- Identify own process, gaps
- Prioritize gaps for action
- Recommend options, in context of own business needs and culture (including need to change culture)
SCIA will try to master this interactive format in future and approach to connect with SCIP chapters and other local CI organizations for accelerated exchange.