Our Employees:
Marcus Hammond, SSG Assistant
“The culture within R&D is unique to RB. We are a dynamic and innovative team who always aim high, and deliver. We work hard, but that’s not to say we don’t have fun. There are many opportunities for socialising and whilst in R&D, many of my colleagues have become friends.
Since starting at RB I’ve had the opportunity to move to different roles within R&D, this has allowed me to tackle different challenges and work on a broad range of projects, giving me the opportunity to learn skills which have progressed my career and developed my scientific knowledge.”
What We Do
Without Research and Development our business has no future. We’re the team that turns great marketing concepts into bestselling products - about 40% of all Reckitt Benckiser revenue comes from products introduced in the last three years. We have six global Research and Development centres of excellence: Hull, Montvale (USA), Mira (Italy), Ludwigshafen, Delhi and Sydney, as well as smaller Research and Development centres worldwide. Each is driven by teams of dedicated scientists, chemists, engineers and fragrance specialists, all of which have an unwavering focus on the consumer.
We’re divided into three key groups. First, New Technologies - a forward-looking global team that aims to anticipate the future needs of our consumers and seek out new technology to deliver solutions. Second is Category Development, which works with marketing to get new products to launch within three years. And thirdly Scientific Services, formed of local and regional teams who focus on products that are already launched and on the the market. These local SSG teams use their technical expertise for a range of projects, from developing a local-need flavour change to delivering a ‘Squeeze’ cost-saving initiative..
How We Do It
Consumers are at the heart of our innovation so the goal for us is to create an effective solution that millions want to buy. We test every idea with consumers: they are locked into the process from one end of the innovation pipeline to the other. Research and Development supports our global marketing groups and together they work as a team to make innovation a success. Once we’re sure that an innovation will deliver performance, we need to roll it out quickly, to capture advantages in as many markets as possible. Our structure also helps us to move faster: each product category is centralising its Research and Development expertise in a single global centre of excellence. Each of these centres works closely with local marketing teams to make the most of their market-specific knowledge.
Challenges We Face
Technical challenges include the obvious: identifying brand new technologies and adapting technology from other industries. But we also need to deliver a wide range of less obvious challenges. We must substantiate on-pack and TV claims, source reliable sources of raw materials, deal with a variety of regulatory environments and ensure products hold up under a wide range of climatic and transport conditions. We also need to consider ways to reduce environmental impact as well as ways to make our products more cost effective. And we need to make sure that everything we develop has consumer relevance - that we create products that people love. To help us keep this goal in mind, our Research and Development people have targets tied to what sells, and not just more traditional Research and Development deliverables.