Vidyadhar (Vidya) Ranade

R&D digital efforts rarely succeed just by adding technology. They succeed when strategy, technology judgment, data, workflows, and change management are all pulling in the same direction.

I started at Unilever, worked in product development, close enough to the bench to see how much of R&D still runs on spreadsheets, shared drives and expert memory, no matter how sophisticated the science is.

Thereafter at McKinsey, advising on strategy—good training in structured thinking, less good at teaching you what happens after the recommendation gets approved. That gap has shaped much of my career since.

As an independent data analytics consultant, I helped B2B industrial clients turn operational and R&D data into better decisions long before “digital transformation” became a boardroom phrase.

At FrieslandCampina, as Digital Director, I built the Digital R&D and Sustainability function from scratch. That meant working across strategy, systems, data, automation, analytics and adoption—with real budgets, competing priorities and deadlines.

Today, through Decodexis Consulting Services, I advise R&D and Digital R&D leaders on the same challenge. I also build software: Augmend automates data capture and extracts usable evidence from the historical and unstructured sources many digitisation projects leave behind—because I would rather help build the fix than only describe it.

Much of that experience is written up in Resources—notes on strategy, data, automation, and what it takes for digital change in R&D to stick.