VP of Engineering
Innovation & R&D
What You Do Today
Create space for innovation — hackathons, R&D sprints, technology exploration, and the time for engineers to experiment with ideas that might become the next product breakthrough.
AI That Applies
AI-powered innovation scouting that identifies emerging technologies relevant to your product, surfaces academic research applicable to your challenges, and tracks competitive R&D investment.
Technologies
How It Works
The system ingests competitive R&D investment as its primary data source. NLP models process the text input by identifying entities, classifying intent, and extracting the structured information needed for downstream decisions. The output — academic research applicable to your challenges — surfaces in the existing workflow where the practitioner can review and act on it. The innovation culture.
What Changes
Technology scouting becomes systematic. The AI surfaces relevant research papers, open-source projects, and competitive technical moves that might inform your R&D direction.
What Stays
The innovation culture. Giving engineers permission to explore, protecting R&D time from delivery pressure, and recognizing breakthrough ideas — that's leadership that enables innovation.
What To Do Next
This section won't tell you what your numbers should be. It will show you how to find them yourself. Every instruction below produces a real, verifiable result in your organization. No benchmarks, no projections — just the steps to build your own evidence.
Establish Your Baseline
Know where you are before you move
Before adopting AI tools for innovation & r&d, understand your current state.
Without a baseline, you can't measure whether AI actually improved anything. You'll adopt tools without knowing if they're working.
Define Your Measures
What to track and how to calculate it
Time per cycle
How to calculate
Measure how long innovation & r&d takes end-to-end today, then after AI adoption.
Why it matters
The most visible improvement is speed. If AI doesn't save time, question whether it's adding value.
Quality of output
How to calculate
Track error rates, rework frequency, or stakeholder satisfaction scores before and after.
Why it matters
Speed without quality is just faster mistakes. Measure both.
Start These Conversations
Who to talk to and what to ask
your board chair or lead independent director
“What data do we already have that could improve how we handle innovation & r&d?”
They shape expectations for how AI appears in governance
your CTO or CIO
“Who on our team has the deepest experience with innovation & r&d, and what tools are they already using?”
They own the technology infrastructure that enables AI adoption
a peer executive at a company further along on AI adoption
“If we brought in AI tools for innovation & r&d, what would we measure before and after to know it actually helped?”
Their lessons learned are worth more than any consultant's framework
Check Your Prerequisites
Confirm readiness before you invest
Check items as you confirm them.