About Gary Craggs
Biography
In a nutshell, Gary is a highly qualified hardware and software engineer with extensive experience in market engagement strategies.
Gary has a B.Tech (Cum Laude) from Johannesburg University (South Africa), an MBA from Open University (UK), and is currently working on a doctorate in organisational psychology at Aston University (UK).
Gary joined Cambridge Silicon Radio in January 2001 and became the technical marketing specialist responsible for driving the adoption of the company's new Bluetooth single chip technology into the mobile phone market, delivering solutions into Nokia, RIM, Samsung and others.
Gary also established the Singapore office as headquarter for Asia. As director leading over 100 employees worldwide, he was also responsible for creating and driving new engineering initiatives into existing and prospective voice and music markets for Qualcomm.
Expertise
Gary specialises in low power, wireless product engineering, such as earbuds, IOT devices and mobile phones. Gary's talents also include an ability to engage customers, marketing, sales and R&D to work together to deliver differentiated solutions to market.
Gary is an expert in the R&D product lifecycle including product specification, hardware and software R&D, which is structured to facilitate early market engagement, product development,
product stabilisation, production engineering, and test engineering for mass market delivery. Sustainability is achieved through including continuous integration within the R&D and marketing processes.
These capabilities are augmented with a strong academic background in engineering, business, and leadership.
Approach
Gary believes in developing an environment conducive to entrepreneurial behaviour within the organisation (intrapreneurship), through engaging marketing, sales, product support and engineering functions in the pursuit of delivering world-class, world-beating, innovative solutions.
Gary's approach to business development
Intrapreneurship
Market penetration
Market penetration
Intrapreneurial employees are employees who are able to recognise new opportunities, and have the motivation and desire to pursue these opportunities to completion within an existing company. Providing a supportive environment that enables this behaviour is a prerequisite for maximising the potential of employees and a key ingredient in employee engagement within an organisation. This engagement is necessary for companies that are wanting to engage in corporate entrepreneurship as a means for improving competitiveness.
Market penetration
Market penetration
Market penetration
Penetrating a new market is not just a function for the marketing organisation. Working together, Gary believes in creating teams of thought leaders from different organisational settings. Having insight into the challenges of integrating new technologies into markets enables mechanisms for show-casing expertise in solving these challenges. This requires an ability to work across boundaries, being dynamic, a willingness to try new initiatives, and the resilience to see it through to successful completion.
360 degree R&D
Market penetration
Market acceptance
Developing a new product requires knowledge, not just of the behaviour and KPI's of the product itself, but foresight into the challenges that will be faced in the delivery and maintenance of the product. Having a fantastic product is not enough if reliability cannot be achieved during customer engagement, production yields cannot be realised during production, or it's use in the field cannot be sustained over the long term. Development is not limited to the product itself but includes the infrastructure and tools needed to ensure quality and long-term sustainability.
Market acceptance
Market sustainablity
Market acceptance
Field trials, compliance to standards and unique customer expectations can be a challenging time for a prospective new product gaining market acceptance.
Developing with the right platforms that are aligned with customers end products are a valuable tool for highlighting potential market specific issues that may arise early in the development cycle. In addition to developing standard development platforms, equivalent reference platforms and associated tools for addressing field level issues are a vital part of the R&D program.
Market sustainablity
Market sustainablity
Market sustainablity
Field upgrades are a standard practice in today's world. Customers expect the latest capabilities on existing product to maintain efficient competitiveness . This is challenge for an incumbent who needs to support existing customers whilst also developing the next generation of products.
Designing continuous integration systems around the existing products to immediately detect and identify regression of quality is a critical capability. It significantly reduces effort, and therefore, time and manpower which can then be deployed elsewhere.
Project Management
Market sustainablity
Market sustainablity
The development of long-term engineering planning roadmaps (EPR) as well as mid-term objectives, such as feature requests, are a process which should integrate the business with all of the functions required to successfully introduce products and new features to market. EPRs and FR planning needs to include marketing, R&D, CI, validation, production, tools, release mechanisms and product support so the business can do the necessary strategic planning to be successful.
Short term methods for program management, such a progress KPIs, quality KPIs and reporting are methods that can, and should, be a part of the organisations continuous integration systems and processes which, if successfully integrated into the marketing / R&D DNA, will significantly reduce the overhead of managing these projects.