The article discusses the challenges faced by Chief Technology Officers (CTOs) in aligning decentralized and hybrid R&D activities with corporate strategy. The author suggests that the right tools are key to achieving this balance between sector-level autonomy and group-level alignment. The CTO's role is to create a common vision/strategy for the group to leverage common resources, create value through the combination of different divisional capabilities, and create transparency to align the overall R&D portfolio with the organization’s strategic and growth objectives. The author notes that CTOs face a challenging variance in process maturity among technical areas and often have no direct reporting lines from the different technical areas. Instead, they tend to work in a power matrix with multiple stakeholders.
