MIT Sloan Management Review

Relationships between a company’s R&D and marketing departments aren’t always cordial.  According to a survey conducted by Philip Kotler, Robert C. Wolcott and Suj Chandrasekhar, only 34% of mid-level managers describe the relationship between their company’s R&D & marketing departments as collegial. 

The researchers describe their findings in their  article “Playing Well With Others,” which is part of the new edition of Business Insight, a collaboration between MIT Sloan Management Review and The Wall Street Journal.

What are the complaints? Among other things, Kotler, Wolcott and Chandrasekhar found that R&D employees complained about poor data from marketing, while marketing folks felt the R&D people did not include them in the early stages of product development. To address the problem, the authors suggest a number of approaches:

• Make sure people understand each department’s value — and how they complement one another.
• Prevent one group or the other from dominating the company’s new product development process.
• Develop a common language for both groups to use.
• Avoid having people stay strictly in their silos.
• And, finally, stay focused on the customer.   

“When engagement and thinking in terms of customer needs becomes routine, everyone has a common vision for what is being developed and why,” the authors note.

What if user communities create their own brands?  That question is explored in an intriguing recent working paper by Johann Füller and Eric von Hippel, an open innovation expert at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Their findings suggest that traditional brands would be wise to pay attention to this emerging arena.

The researchers surveyed members of Outdoorseiten.Net (ODS), a community of German, Austrian and Swiss hikers, about their brand preferences — and found that ODS members showed significant interest in buying hiking products with the community’s ODS logo. For example, when community members were asked whether they would prefer to buy a backpack from their favorite commercial manufacturer or one that was of equal quality and price but instead had the ODS logo, slightly more than one-third preferred the ODS product, and an additional 17.7% viewed the two brands as equally attractive.

From these and related findings, the authors conclude that user communities have the potential to create strong brands at low cost. Such user-generated brands, they suggest,  can represent potential competition for traditional brands — but they may also present opportunities for co-branding and collaboration.

How do you ensure that your product stays relevant in the future? Reach out to the next generation of innovators. In what sounds like a smart marketing tactic, several large companies are seeking to encourage software start-ups to use their products and services  – through initiatives that range from free software development tools to a contest.

Microsoft in November launched a program  called BizSpark that offers eligible software start-ups around the globe free access to various Microsoft products — as long as the start-ups are privately held, less than three years old, have annual revenue of less than $1 million  and are referred by partners such as venture capitalists. (The start-ups do pay a $100 fee when they leave the program.) Meanwhile, Sun Microsystems has a program for start-ups called Sun Startup Essentials that includes discounted servers and open source software. And Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently announced this year’s winner of a contest it sponsors for start-ups that use its cloud computing platform.

Microsoft is also reaching out to those who may become future  innovators: High-school and college students in a number of countries can participate in its DreamSpark program to download a number of Microsoft software development tools for free.