Research & Development

Bridging the Gap Between Visionary Innovation and Industrial Performance

From early-stage concept to full-scale industrialisation, we empower your R&D function to become a driver of sustainable growth. We combine deep engineering DNA with operational excellence to ensure your innovations don’t just reach the market — they lead it.

How we transform R&D

R&D organisations face unprecedented challenges: being competitive, responsible, resilient, digital, and innovative all at once. We support companies across five strategic pillars:

01

Innovating faster and smarter

Product lifecycles are shrinking and competitive windows are narrowing. Companies that cannot accelerate innovation lose market share -- but raw speed without strategic clarity leads to scattered portfolios and wasted engineering effort. The challenge is compressing development cycles whilst making sharper decisions about where to invest R&D resources.

Innovation Strategy & Portfolio Management
Structuring innovation roadmaps, prioritising investments, and managing the pipeline from ideation to industrialisation
Design-to-Value
Analysing customer value drivers to eliminate over-specification and focus engineering effort where it creates the most product differentiation
Systems Engineering (MBSE)
Front-loading requirements and architecture decisions to enable faster iteration and reduce late-stage rework that slows innovation
Modular & Platform Strategies
Reusing proven modules and standardised interfaces across product generations to cut development time and cost simultaneously
AI-Augmented Engineering
Leveraging generative AI and advanced simulation to accelerate design exploration, documentation, and decision-making
02

Mastering product cost and producibility from the design phase

Up to 80% of a product’s lifecycle cost is determined during design. Yet cost engineering and manufacturability are too often treated as afterthoughts — targets imposed on engineering teams rather than integrated design disciplines. The result: late-stage redesigns, products that are expensive to manufacture, and margins eroded before the first unit ships.

Design to cost
Using target costing, parametric models, and should-cost analysis to lock in economic performance from concept phase
Design for Manufacturing & Assembly
Embedding producibility and assembly constraints as design parameters from the earliest stages
Design-to-X
Extending design disciplines to quality, serviceability, reliability, and sustainability — ensuring products are optimised across their full lifecycle
Industrial De-risking
Coordinating early supplier involvement and make-or-buy analysis to match design ambition with real-world manufacturing capabilities
Engineering Knowledge Management
Leveraging design rules, prototyping strategies, and lessons learned to avoid repeating costly mistakes
03

Managing the complexity of large-scale programmes

Large-scale programmes span multiple years, disciplines, and partners. Coordination failures and scope creep often lead to budget overruns. The challenge is delivering on spec, on time, and on budget — across organisations that were not designed to work together. And as products become increasingly software-intensive, the engineering landscape now spans mechanical, electronic, and software domains simultaneously.

Programme Governance:
Establishing clear decision rights, milestone tracking, and risk management across multi-partner, multi-site programmes
Systems Engineering
Structuring requirements, architectures, and interfaces to manage complexity across mechanical, electronic, and software domains
Cost & Budget Management
Implementing earned value tracking and parametric estimation to maintain cost control throughout the programme lifecycle
Configuration Management:
Maintaining product definition integrity across variants, versions, and engineering changes
04

Designing products for resilience and sustainability

Supply shocks and environmental regulations have redefined R&D. Products must now be sustainable by design whilst remaining resilient to global resource volatility — and all of this without destroying product economics.

Eco-design & LCA
Integrating lifecycle assessment and carbon footprint modelling into the design workflow
Value Engineering for Sustainability
Challenging specifications and material choices to find the right balance between environmental performance and cost
Circular Economy Strategy
Designing for remanufacturing, recyclability, and extended product life
Resilient Sourcing
Substitutive engineering to reduce dependence on critical raw materials and localise sourcing
05

Transforming the R&D organisation for sustained performance

R&D performance depends on organisational design. Siloed structures and unclear governance create bottlenecks that slow down even the best engineering teams. And with 70% of R&D digital transformations failing, the challenge is not deploying new tools — it is transforming the organisation around them.

R&D Diagnosis & Capability Management
Assessing R&D maturity, benchmarking performance, and building capability roadmaps to guide transformation
R&D Operating Model
Redefining structures, roles, and decision-making frameworks for cross-functional, multi-site engineering organisations
Digital Adoption & Change Management
Supporting the cultural and methodological shift from document-based to model-based engineering
Performance Management
Developing custom KPIs and diagnostics to steer engineering productivity and cost performance
Change Management
Coaching teams to adopt new ways of working and a culture of continuous improvement

Digital Enablers

Our R&D transformation engagements are supported by our PLM & Digital Engineering expertise, ensuring digital continuity and collaboration tools are aligned with engineering processes and ways of working.
Explore our PLM & Digital Engineering expertise
Digital Enablers

Powered by Mews Labs

Accelerating R&D through Data & AI

Our advanced modelling and optimisation team, Mews Labs, develops custom AI assets to solve your most complex engineering problems. From design optimisation to lifecycle assessment automation, we embed technology at the heart of your R&D.

Design exploration and optimisation Design exploration and optimisation Exploring thousands of design variants through multi-criteria optimisation to identify the best trade-offs between weight, cost, performance, and environmental impact
AI-enhanced simulation AI-enhanced simulation Combining physics-based models with machine learning to accelerate testing cycles and reduce physical prototyping through fast, accurate surrogate models
Engineering knowledge extraction Engineering knowledge extraction Mining technical documentation with NLP and generative AI to automate requirements analysis, detect design reuse opportunities, and accelerate early-phase engineering
Product digital twin Product digital twin Connecting design, simulation, and real-world performance data into living digital representations that support decisions across the entire product lifecycle

Selected R&D project

Our R&D clients

Meet our R&D experts

Our R&D consultants combine deep technical expertise with hands-on operational experience across aerospace, automotive, and industrial sectors.

CTA Background

Parlez-nous de vos défis

Nous travaillons avec des organisations confrontées à des défis complexes en matière de R&D, de chaîne d'approvisionnement ou de transformation opérationnelle.

Nous contacter