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5 Tips for Fast Innovation

Developing new products and processes involves several things, it involves inventing, it involves reseaching, it involves manufactring and it involves hard work.  But one thing that is common to every stage of R&D and manufacturing is the prinicpal of continuous learning.  Below are five ways to lay a strong foundation for fast innovation, whether you’re in a University setting, a large corportion or are planning a high tech start up these steps can help.

  1. Study external publications, save experimental and study time by learning from others, I am amazed that people skip or skim over this step, there is much to learn from others, if you’ll take the time.
  2. Study inventions, patent’s teach in detail what someone is patenting, take advantage of this by studying other peoples patents (be careful to not infringe).
  3. Collaborate with others, you can learn from others by seeking out the expertise of others, take advantage of other people’s place on the leanring curve.
  4. Use tools like hypothesis trees to guide experimentation, by taking alot of time sitting down with other experts you can intensely focus your experimentation time rather than guessing what to experiment on.
  5. Write down what you are leanring as a team, its easy to forget what has already been learned, write down everything that has been learned in one place, make sure everyone has access and can contribute to this document or blog.

R&D and manufacturing is a learning process primarily, take the time to place rigor around your learning process and you will not regret it.

Do you know of other ways to encourage fast learning for the innovative organization?

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Competency is Critical

Good Leader Bad Manager

Have you ever wondered what makes a great manager? It is more than leadership skill, I know of several good leaders who make ineffective managers. There are also effective managers who don’t seem to be strong leaders. What can explain this discrepancy? How could a strong leader not manage well? I think that competency makes all the difference in high-tech R&D leadership.

In the field of high-tech R&D an effective manager needs to be competent in their field. The level of competence needed for effective management is often underestimated. Many think strong leaders will lead well wherever they are. If they are trained in management then they will lead well even if they are not competent in their field. Project leadership teacher say one does not necessarily need to understand the science in depth to lead a technical project. I believe this is often not the case.

“Competence is possessing skill and knowledge that allows us to do something successfully. It also describes the ability to apply prior experience to new situations with good effect. Our competency usually increases over time as we acquire more information and ability through inquiry, observation, and participation…” –  www.wisdomcommons.org

High Tech Competence

Most R&D projects require high-tech competence beyond the average person. Compared to running a retail business or marketing products or managing a construction project, high-tech competence is difficult to find. Therefore managers of these projects must be willing and able to learn from his/her scientists. Even be able and willing to work as a scientist in order to gain the necessary competency to manage.

Often the employees who are highly competent in science don’t make great managers because they are not interested in management. They became scientists because that’s what they wanted to do, they love science and love inventing. Few want to move into the stressful field of management? As a result many scientists are not accustomed to making difficult decisions under pressure.

But for those brave enough to venture into management I think there are at least three things we can do to prepare ourselves to manage R&D projects.

  1. Pursue competence through study and research, don’t take the shallow expert in everything approach, go deep into whatever you are working on.
  2. Always be in the habit of learning from your own experiments or other scientist’s work?
  3. Become decisive, develop the habit of making decisions and correcting bad decisions, break through the fear of making bad decisions.

Have you ever noticed a strong leader who is a lousy manager? and was competence part of the problem?

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The Learning Industry

I work in research and development for a technology company. I’ve been in an R&D division since the mid 90’s. I work with some of the most intelligent and skilled people that one could imagine. These people are from the top universities and have created dozens of inventions making life better for countless millions of people.

There are many things that I will write on the topic of research, development and innovation in this blog, but in this post I want to bring out the concept of learning. We in R&D are professional learner’s, we are paid to learn for our company. We learn then invent on behalf of the company.

All of this learning has taught me several valuable insights, (besides all of the technology and science). Four of these insights are listed below.

  1. There must be a proper environment created for learning.
  2. There are private learning curves and corporate learning curves and they are very different.
  3. The faster the private learning’s become corporate learning’s the more efficient the R&D organization will be.
  4. An early stage organization may pay several times for the same learnings without good management.

Management of the learning, teaching and collaboration processes is critical in R&D. When I see attitudes in universities and industry where information is siloed with insecure scientists and engineers I know that is contrary to efficient innovation. It is wastefulness on display; it’s the opposite of what is needed for quality innovation. To have the attitude of the insecure scientist who conceals learning’s from the competition is contrary to what needs to happen in the learning industry of research and development.

An efficient research and development organization is one that both learns and teaches, that is our trade and those with attitudes or behavior contrary to that should consider changing fields.

Are you in the reseach industry?

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