At the core of many R&D and innovation projects lies a broader commercial objective. This could include launching a new product, improving operational capability, entering a new market, or creating long-term competitive advantage, to name a few. As projects evolve, organisations need clear visibility not only into technical progress, but also into the commercial outcomes and milestones associated with innovation investment.
However, commercial progress reporting is often fragmented across spreadsheets, meetings, and disconnected systems, making it difficult to track budgets, deliverables, timelines, and business impact in real time. This limits visibility for leadership teams, creates reporting challenges for grant-funded projects, and weakens strategic decision-making.
At the core of Grant-funded R&D and Innovation projects typically lies an important commercial activity taking place by the funded parties.
Usually, the work undertaken in a funded R&D and Innovation project is broken out into Work Packages. Against each work package are Tasks, Milestones and/or Deliverables. Typically, particularly in larger projects, each work package has an associated budget.
Progress Reporting against Work Packages in ReaDI-Watch
In ReaDI-Watch's RD&I Project Management toolkit, you can create a set of work packages, with all of the associated details of the structure of the project. This is usually copied directly from the successful application!
You can add the following to get started:
- Team Members
- Description of Work Package
- Milestones/Deliverables
- Files
See the below video to get started:
In order to track the project in real-time, and depending on the requirements of the grant, users can track the following in a work package:
- Expenses
- Timelogs
- Progress Updates
- Investigations/Experiments
- Files
Generating a Commercial Progress Report
When it comes to generating progress reports, ReaDI-Watch offers a very flexible "Reporting Center". This has two key capabilities:
- Creating Templates
- Generating Reports
Creating Templates
Templates can be generated in ReaDI-Watch against the requirements as set out in the grant-funding programme. Commercial Progress Reporting is usually coupled with Technical/Technological progress reporting (often broken out by Work Packages). There are standard templates available on ReaDI-Watch, and you can generate your own repository of templates.
Generating Reports
Once templates are generated, reports against specific RD&I projects can be quickly prepared. On our dynamic reporting center, you can quickly pull-in project data using a "Variable Fill" method, and then edit and refine the report to your needs!
We recommend finalizing the report as much as possible, before exporting - so that you keep a close record online of all the reporting for RD&I - this information can be taken forward for future years and future draw-downs.