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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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Announcement – Podcast Coming Soon!!!

I fell in love with podcasting this past January 2013 I listen to business and other podcasts daily and decided I simply must create a podcast.

If you are unfamiliar with podcasting, a podcast is basically an audio blog another way to explain it is radio on demand, you can listen to podcasts over an internet site or through a smart phone.

Podcastlogo

iTunes has the largest and best selection of podcasts. To start listening to podcasts simply downloand the ‘Podcast’ or ‘Stitcher’ ap on your iPhone to begin listening about your favorite topic. If you have an Android try the Podkicker app or the iPP Podcast Player.  There are a huge and growing number of podcasts out there so check out your favorite topic.  Podcasts are great to listen to while driving, exercising, mowing, etc, just pop in some ear buds and push play, it is great.

I have decided to start a podcast about the niche topic; organizational health for innovation organizations.  I plan to primarily discuss organizational health for R&D organization, including ways to accelerate product development through effective innovation, how get more engagement and participation from science motivated employees, the type of culture to create and encourage for your innovation teams, and much more.

This is primarily a business podcast for the high-tech sector but we may also discuss other organizational health topics including leadership, good science vs. bad science, family health, church health,  ‘culture’ and team mindset.

I am passionate about this topic and feel there is a lack of audio content about this topic, I have more than 17 years of experience in the high-tech R&D sector and I am eager to start talking about this topic.

The podcast episodes will reside on this website and I expect they will become the primary purpose of this site.

I hope to have the first few episodes produced and published before the end of summer 2013.

Please stay tuned, and if you haven’t yet please load the appropriate podcast app to your smart phone today, you wont regret it.

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