Feeder Futures Quotes

Technology research projects three to five years from commercialization were the feeder system for DuPont’s future revenues and margins. There were lots of them, all consuming precious resources, particularly the expertise of key people whose efforts were diluted over too many projects. In Connelly’s view, so many projects could neither be properly managed nor given the proper amount of resources. He and Bingham looked at the hundreds of projects that were within three to five years of launch and picked seventy-five (limited to no more than a handful per business unit) that they judged had the highest probability of success. The top seventy-five projects had to meet three criteria: address a well-defined unmet market need; the business must have or be reasonably expected to develop a unique solution to the need; and the business must have an effective route by which the solution could be delivered to the market. For a company whose development efforts had been driven by R&D for most of its two-hundred-year history, that shift represented a major turning point.