Foreword
Welcome to Capgemini’s first annual report on Engineering and R&D trends. Today’s leaders in Engineering and R&D (ER&D) intensive firms operate in a complex business environment. An environment shaped by a dynamic series of interconnected macro-forces: supply chain disruptions, geo-political tensions, and economic uncertainty to name but three.
Adapting and thriving in this environment involves decisions about how a company’s ER&D operating model should work at scale. Leaders must also reconcile objectives about their future business while also optimizing for the present. This is a world of trade-offs: safeguarding profits from current product lines, sustaining innovation for future high margin products, ensuring core engineering is efficient and that the overall engineering operating model is agile enough to adapt to future changes.
In short, we face a rapidly changing world, where companies – some producing products with 20 year lifespans – need to innovate, adapt, and respond rapidly for the short and long term, and do this cost-effectively without compromising quality.This report explores the thinking of current leaders; how they expect their organizations to be impacted by external macro-forces, what enterprise-scale ER&D challenges this creates for them, and how they are responding. The report is based on the input of leaders from a range of businesses and framed by our experience working with the world’s largest ER&D intensive companies. Some of this success has been built on enterprise-scale outsourcing of ER&D services. We see no reason why this will change.
I hope you find the perspectives of your peers insightful and helpful in your own reflections on ER&D strategy.
William Roze CEO, Capgemini Engineering
