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002 The Science Layer Podcast – Interview with Phil McKinney

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Want to learn more about innovation and R&D? well you’ve come to the right place with this episode!

This great interview with Mr. Phil McKinney of Cable Labs and PhilMcKinney.com is a perfect introductory interview for this podcast.  Mr. McKinney did not disappoint with fascinating insight and commentary about the use of science and technology in the private and public sectors.

Phil McKinney is President and CEO of CableLabs. He heads the research and development organization responsible for charting the cable industry’s technology and innovation road map.

Prior to joining CableLabs, Phil was the VP and CTO of the $40 billion (FY12) Personal Systems Group at HP.  He was responsible for long-range strategic planning,  R&D and product road maps for the company’s PC product lines, including mobile devices, notebooks, desktops and workstations. In addition, McKinney was founder and leader of HP’s Innovation Program Office (IPO). The IPO was chartered to identify, incubate and launch adjacent and fundamentally new technologies, products and services that would become the future growth engines for HP.

 

Interview Notes:

Phil shares how he began podcasting with his Killer Innovations podcast even before iTunes and it was primarily as an outgrowth of his blog and in response to people seeking him for advice in how to lead innovative teams to come up with great ideas that turn into profitable products.

Phil is excited about the future of display technologies and the new enabling technology that next generation displays are enabling.  Check out Corning Inc.’s A Day Made of Glass video here or part 2 here

Phil suggested that it might be a good idea to be in the top quartile of your competitors in R&D spending.

Phil pointed out the healthy role between government and science. President Kennedy set the vision to travel to the moon yet he let it to the scientists and engineers to actually get there. Kennedy did not attempt to pick the technological winners and steer funds to any one technology.  Kennedy only set the vision (BHAG, Big Hairy Audacious Goal) and made the way for resources, he did not attempt to guide the scientists and engineers in the technology or strategy of how they successfully made it to the moon.  See Kennedy’s speech here to Congress from 1962 challenging the nation to strive for the moon.

Check out Phil McKinney’s website here.

Check out Phil’s Killer Innovations Podcast site here. Or search for Killer Innovations in iTunes, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Purchase Phil’s Beyond the Obvious Book Here (affiliate link)
Beyond The Obvious Book

The opinions expressed in this podcast are not necessarily those of my employer or the employer of my interviewees.

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Innovate with PATIENCE

I have a tendancy to become impatient, however like many people, the older I become the more patient I become. Patience is useful in life, I see it in my 5-year-old, impatience makes him give up way too soon, impatience makes him treat people poorly, impatience causes him to lose focus and act on fear or anger rather than principles.

Patience also is useful for innovation organizations engaging in R&D, patience can sometimes make or break these types of organizations.

It is important to in grain patience into the organizational culture for at least 3 reasons:

  1. Markets for technology are on a different timeline than technology invention. We should invent continuously and (sometimes) wait for markets to demand the inventions.

  2. Impatient organizations give up on highly talented employees before they can contribute their full value. Some employees are brilliant, creative and intelligent, some of these employees develop slowly.  Their brilliance, creativity and intelligence are highly valuable but they may not be on the same timeline as are the markets.

  3. Patient organizations communicate better because they stay focused on their core principles longer, they do not get distracted easily by hot markets, by 2-year recessions, by technology fads, or by toxic politics that come and go like the weather.

So how do we create patience in our innovation centered organizations? I think there are at least two ways, first make patience a core value, leadership should all agree that patience is valuable to the organization, then document and communicate this value often, very often, more often then you think is reasonable.

Another way to encourage patience in employee mindset is by creating a culture that values people and teams that actually get to know one another. Leaders can create promotion criteria that rewards collaboration, rewards cooperation rather than cause internal competition.  Employees and managers who have relationships with one another are more likely to be patient with one another and put up with one another’s weaknesses.

Over time organizations will see a return on their investment in patient innovation.

Is your organization patient?

Please comment on this post on twitter @Colliers2 or email me at colliersengineering@gmail.com!

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Innovation Teams – Categorized by Behavior

I like to categorize teams based on predominant behavior rather than function in order to highlight helpful or unhelpful behaviors for an organization. Below are three common types of R&D/ Innovation teams.

  1. The Siloed Team

  2. The Collaborative Team

  3. The Managed Team

The siloed team has strong technical contributors, they are very skilled technically, they are actively inventing and learning.  The siloed team tends to be competitive internally, the technical contributors hold back their insights and are reluctant to share what they know and what they plan.  This is both a strength and weakness, a strength because it often increases the quality of the science done by the team,  yet it is a weakness for the company because internal collaboration would significantly speed up time to market.

The behaviors of most in the siloed team is a product of both team members disposition and management’s promotion criteria.  The siloed team tends to have learning curves that move with the ability of the individual contributors. Managers often later compile learnings (learnings that are shared up) and then make business decisions. 

The collaborative team is characterized by team members who do not mind sharing what they are learning and sharing credit for team progress.  The behavior of the collaborative team is mostly result of the team members level of maturity and the ability of the managers who oversee it. The collaborative team learns the fastest for the company and ‘get to the point’ of new innovations as fast as possible.

The managed team is the third type of team. The managed team works well with their leadership and enjoys communicating up.  The meanaged team is open to sharing credit and the individuals on the team do not mind making their manager successful. A weakness of this team may be that those who are very strong technically may dislike this type of team and avoid it also corporate bureaucracies can sometimes thrive.

The goal of any science and engineering innovation team is to learn quickly and ‘get to the point’ to where new innovations thrive for the company or university and get there as fast as possible.  The collaborative team typically gets there the fastest. The siloed team can repeatedly learn the same things over again because they don’t take the time to learn from one another competing for that next promotion or award.

The biggest harm created by the siloed team is time wasted, time to market is the key to new innovations for a company.  The ability of an R&D organization to get from siloed to collaborative will have a large impact on how successful the company or university department will be over time, some may never get there and are simply wasting money, they may be the most intellectually talent people around but they are still wasting money.

Do you have tips for making a team less siloed?

I have decided to ignore all comments on this blog due to excessive amounts of spam so please tweet comments to @Colliers2 or email me directly at colliersengineering@gmail.com,

Adam Collier

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