Leila Bostanci is a consumer-centric scientist, innovator, and R&D leader who focuses on sustainability, strategy, and team empowerment. She consolidates technical, innovative, and business insights into R&D strategies that solve problems for customers, team members, and the organization. Her career includes some of Europe’s most significant food brands, like Mondelēz, Dr. Oetker, and GlaxoSmithKline. She is currently a R&D team leader in processed cheeses and cheese sauces at Savencia.
As a specialized recruiter for life sciences, pharma, and FMCG, Grapefrute works with some of Europe’s most innovative companies and groundbreaking researchers. Grapefrute constantly seeks to learn, explore, and understand our industry and our world, especially in these tumultuous times. Recently, Grapefrute co-founder Bart Jeurissen sat down with Leila Bostanci for a wide-ranging conversation about the power of innovation in a changing world. In part 1, they discussed the role of R&D within an innovative organization. In part 2, they discuss recruiting and supporting effective R&D teams.
Future-Proof R&D Skills
Bart: We see a lot of employers now looking for very specific, niche skills within R&D. But are those types of highly specialized skills necessary for long term success? What other factors should employers be considering?
Leila: What are the skills R&D people usually have that are relevant to the future? They’re open to new things. They are interested in lifelong learning. They have critical thinking; they have analytical thinking. They’re creative. You find lots of the words that I’ve just mentioned in the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs report.
R&D people are also good at celebrating the diversity of ideas, following them up in great numbers, and with fast iterations. This helps in a fast-moving, complex and always ambiguous world, where causal connections can not always be identified, and companies want to capitalise on fast-moving trends and ever-new consumer needs and wishes. A constant flexibility of mind, together with probabilistic leadership and a certain level of meta-cognition, rather than claiming all knowledge, will support this.
As I mentioned before, that’s why I’m saying R&D needs to be a business partner, it needs to be holistic. And that’s probably not surprising when you look at my CV. I studied food science and nutrition, I’ve done an MBA, I’ve lived in different countries, etc. So it is very clear to me that people need to be skilled in more than one topic. This holds true, of course, not only for people involved in innovation or RD, but certainly helps with making new and unorthodox connections between seemingly unconnected topics and driving innovation.
You have to have the usual skills in project management, facilitation, stakeholder management, a structured way of thinking etc, so that you have a good outcome. But there is also, from an R&D point of view, another thing that I think will help. This is another topic that I always try to have in my head: looking around corners. What’s next out there that other people haven’t seen yet? And how do I use tools from, for example, strategic management and foresight, to utilize those in R&D? How I do an extrapolation of data is easy enough; that’s basically statistics, and that is part of R&D sometimes. But ‘How do I stretch myself to purposefully create a different world?’ And sense check and say, ‘What will consumers need in that world? Can I develop that before somebody else develops it?’
R&D is always a journey or an evolution of topics and solutions, both in individual projects, and for the whole department. In R&D you regularly have to learn, unlearn and relearn different topics.
R&D is usually more about intellectual curiosity, learning, and culture/team environment than about the highest possible salary. It is about capabilities (knowledge, facilities, budget) as much as competencies (skills and application of concepts). The competitive advantage R&D provides is driven by the incrementality of various actions over time.
The Importance of Diversity in innovation
Bart: The word “diversity” is getting a lot of both positive and negative attention lately. You’ve mentioned that diversity is an important aspect of a great R&D team; could you talk a bit more about why?
Leila: I don’t believe that one brain has all the ideas. We’re living in a complex world, and I actually mean this in terms of complexity, system thinking, research, etc.
We do not have enough time to sequence all our trials, so we need to do them in parallel, before the market is taken or has moved on. And for that we need more than one good idea at a time, and that’s easier when you have different backgrounds. So diversity of thought, as well as a more usual definition of the word, is one of the topics that I strongly believe in.
I am leading my team in developing diversity in thought and background, and helping people grow their boundaries. It implies that people should not only be skilled in one area, but have a variety of experiences.
You know, there’s no substitute for experience. If you have been trained very classically, to think only like this, and you always have done that all your life, it becomes more difficult to be open minded. If you have been already exposed to different ideas, different cultures, different things, then it becomes easier. However I strongly believe, if you are willing to learn, and you find a good way into a new topic, you can go a long way.
R&D can take a leading role in being a learning environment if you have the right personalities in the team. Personality (i.e. soft skills, learning agility and capacity) is probably more important than job function in that respect. In innovation it is very important to be curious about continuous development and new topics. For me this is more than a catch phrase; it is an area where I’m trying to encourage my team, to say ‘Great that you know your process technology, great that you may have one or two people to manage, but what’s next?’ I hire people for personality much more than for degree. Then it’s really the mix of the team that works.
The Relationship Between Research & Development and Company Culture
Bart: We work with some of the most talented scientists and researchers in Europe, and they constantly cite culture as a key factor in their job searches. Why is culture so important for success in R&D innovation?
Leila: Culture… what’s the phrase? Culture eats strategy for breakfast. Culture is the one thing that’s really hard to change, and the one thing that’s really important to get right. It’s far more difficult to motivate a demotivated person, than to demotivate a motivated person. So culture is absolutely crucial.
As a leader I focus on culture a lot with the team that I am growing at the moment. I also push for change management, and establishing our tech center. And I shouldn’t call it a tech center, because I don’t want it to be related only to tech, but the in-going position needs to be ‘Guys, you’re all okay as you are, but I want you all to be willing to be open, adapt, and try new things.’ And then I need to put the infrastructure and resources in place so that people can work well. At the same time it needs to be providing a safe space for ideas and for sharing – without the fear of humiliation, blame, or making mistakes.
Unsuccessful attempts pave the way for innovation. Therefore, culture needs to be open, and sharing has to include everyone’s inspiration and reflections.
Self-reflection is super important for any learning. I’ve even done a half-day training for the whole team last year only on self-reflection. I want you to reflect. Where are you breaking the rules, why are you breaking them, can we make them better, etc. – this applies for ways of working, as well as technical ideas. What are our underlying assumptions, and are they still valid or are there other possibilities? Another word for these other possibilities is innovation.
Culture is super important. And if you do not invest in it, don’t expect it to appear magically. The good thing is that culture is something that is very powerful, and you can invest in it relatively easily.
Currently, some companies are closer to shrinking the team than to expanding it. But, thinking as an investor, shrinking is usually the worst thing you can do when you’re in financial trouble, because then you have no leverage at all. Do you know what people in the stock market do when the stocks go down? They don’t say ‘The stock market is going down. We need to shrink.’ They invest. They see it as an opportunity to lay foundations in new areas for future success, while others are licking their wounds.
Don’t get me wrong. Improving business efficiency is important. But the smart investor is, at the same time, focussing on future assets. So, let’s make sure we find ways to strengthen the forces for future innovation. We are not living in a world where you learn something and do it for 50 years and then retire. Upskilling is a given. If you stop, you fall behind. R&D is uniquely placed for that, because we have all these conflicting concepts and conflicting skill sets that we have already combined. And that’s an area where you can do a lot with little money, because the knowledge is there. You just need to find the right people, find ways to motivate them, and then give them the experiences, culture, and time to flourish.
In the next and final part of this series, Bart and Leila discuss how R&D teams and innovative companies can help lead the way to a healthier, more sustainable future.
The experts at Grapefrute have years of experience recruiting for successful R&D teams in Europe’s most innovative companies. They have the background, knowledge, and experience to help companies find the talent to take them to the next level. For more insights on how to find the right candidates for your company, contact Grapefrute today.
