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You are a manager in a large organization. How do you transform an R&D project in a solution actually adopted by the teams on the ground? 

In an article published on the HBR, Stadler, Helfat and Verona propose three strategies effective in encouraging adoption of new tools developed by a company’s central R&D team: 

1. START WITH THE USERS: large companies take often a top-down approach, developing new technologies based on high-level considerations. This approach can make adopters resistant to change! A bottom-up approach can prove much more beneficial: if the people on the ground are on board, they will embrace the challenge and do the work necessary to make the advance succeed. 
2. SELECT THE RIGHT EARLYADOPTERS: to maximize their chances of success, R&D teams need to identify which users will be the most receptive to specific new technologies and work with them through constant updates and feedbacks. 
3. MITIGATE THE MONEY BARRIER: implementation of new systems often requires both man-hours and significant capital investment. Most R&D teams can’t fully subsidize the implementation costs for new technologies. It is thus critical to explore creativesolutions to gather the resources needed, for instance by recurring to an internal incubator or by bringing together projects of different sizes. 

To gain traction internally, companies must treat users as partners, addressing their actual needs rather than insisting they implement solutions that don’t actually work for them. That means starting from the bottom up, identifying the best potential early adopters, and addressing the challenges that keep the people on the ground from successful implementation. 

[Complete article, “3 Strategies for Rolling Out New Tech Within Your Company”, available at https://hbr.org/2021/08/3-strategies-for-rolling-out-new-tech-within-your-company]