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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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Increase Your Collaboration

Collaboration is critical to innovating successfully. Working within any sector no two employees are the same, each has a unique set of skills and knowledge.  Whether it be skill with understanding physical mechanisms and designing complex experiments or in-depth knowledge about a supply chains.  A company’s greatest asset is the knowledge lying within its employees.  Monetizing this growing and diverse knowledge base can occur faster and more complete by connecting all of this knowledge. 

poster session

Connecting the knowledge that lies within the heads of our employees can occur easiest through collaboration.

According to Miriam Webster the definition of collaboration is:

: to work jointly with others or together especially in an intellectual endeavors
 
I think that ’employees helping employees’ summarizes well the concept of collaboration any business related topic should be considered ‘intellectual endeavors’.
 
This is all well and good but we can not ignore the fact that collaboration does not always come easily. I have worked for almost 20 years and with dozens of R&D scientists, engineers and technicians through the years and have never met one that always enjoys collaborating. There are good reasons that we do not want to collaborate, however I think the biggest reason is the need to get credit  for our work, we need credit for our work if we are to enjoy career growth.
 
Why should I share my latest ideas, insights and learnings with people who will then pitch them to management and take credit?
 
This is the number one obstacle to collaboration and I believe is the number one hindrance to speeding up R&D and innovation.
 
This credit issue is not always easy to talk about, it is like the elephant in the room, it is not related to technical skill or intelligence but is a behavioral management issue, it is an organizational health issue, we feel selfish to admit that we want credit, we feel selfish to say ” why should I work with him or help him, when I wont get any credit?”  But the truth is most of us feel that way, most of us realize we need credit, we need managers to recognize and give us credit if we are to go anywhere in our career. Those heavily promoted are almost always skilled at getting credit for their own and/ or other people’s work.
 
Imagine what we could do together if it did not matter who got the credit.
 
Below are three ways I think that we can increase collaboration within large innovation centered organizations:
  1. Design and enforce a corporate-wide fair distribution of credit, being mindful and cautions of the type of people who you are promoting, don’t allow credit stealing, don’t allow champions at politicking to dominate the culture, remember we get more of what we promote, for the good or for the bad. Promote collaborators, promote teachers, promote maturity in your workforce not extreme loyalty.
  2. Employ social collaboration tools, software for social collaboration is growing rapidly, these tools will only become more widespread and I believe should be adopted as soon as possible.
  3. Build an indexed storehouse of corporate knowledge of summarized reports and IP.  Knowledge management and access is critical to minimize re-learning, parallel learning and total loss of learnings to email and overworked managers.

 What else hinders collaboration within organizations?

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Teaching – One Pillar of Healthy Innovation

I think there are three pillars to healthy innovation within a company or university.

  1. Teaching
  2. Collaboration
  3. Organizational Health

Leave-Me-Alone

In this post I’d like to discuss teaching, I’ll touch on the others in later posts.

Have you ever encountered scientists or engineers who refuse to change their innovation habits?  They seem to know everything, they ridicule most efforts at managing innovation and are almost impossible to influence.

I’ve acted this way myself, scoffing at attempts to manage innovation, telling managers and the like to just leave me alone, I’ll figure it out and send you a report. There is value in just leaving a good innovator alone but that is just one tool of many in innovation management.

The accumulation of knowledge tends to increase ego, if you’ve spent a lot of time around certain University professors it is not hard to see this:

1 Corinthians 8:1 … knowledge puffs up …

Valuable R&D professionals discover, accumulate and manage knowledge very efficiently.

We need to lead our innovative teams in a way that will both cause our most innovative R&D pros to collaborate together and in a way that does not trigger anger and resistance.

I am convinced that there is a win-win if we can encourage our scientists to teach.  If we can get our R&D professionals to teach one another, teach leadership, and document learning’s with a motive of teaching this will trigger collaboration, sharing of knowledge, and a feeling of being engaged, (which will speed up innovation long-term).  The great thing about teaching is that it appeals to intellectual ego that can cause us to be uncooperative at times.

What are  other tips at getting R&D professionals to collaborate?

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