I think there are three pillars to healthy innovation within a company or university.
- Teaching
- Collaboration
- Organizational Health
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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