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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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Social Media with Research and Development

Social media is not only a time waster for your 15 year old, it can also be a tool to enhance the effectiveness of your organization.  With the inspiration of Twitter, the microblog platform can offer most organizations a tool to collaborate, share accomplishments and reduce the time and money spent on R&D.  As a scientist, engineer, technician or manager tackles an innovation project they begin to learn.  They learn through studying publications, through studying textbooks, through experimentation, through convestations with others in the field, through making purchases and through brainstorming sessions with subject matter experts.  The learnings can be highly technical or simple market facts.  Regardless of what is learned, the learning itself is a necessary step for the organization to succefully innovate and penetrate their target market. The more people in the organization the greater the need to share learnings.  This is typically done through periodic reporting to the supervisor and sometimes through collaboration meetings

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I can see an opportunity for individuals in an organization to teach others via a twitter like microblog internal to each organization.  Perhaps call it a Learning Blog or a Teaching Blog, whatever it is named, the learning blog application holds the potential to reduce money spent on learning by much faster organization-wide teaching and learning.  Yammer is one such tool that can be used for this, microsoft recently purchased Yammer and pland to incoporate this concept into their operating platform.

The R&D learning blog (if used!) can reduce siloed learning that is so common in large organizations.  Incentives may be necessary to kick start participation.

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