I work in R&D at a big company, and I think there is some merit to this position.
It is not impossible, but incredibly difficult to innovate within a large company with business processes not designed for it.
The problem is essentially the corporate equivalent of people who post on HN saying they want to make a startup but have no good ideas. If you don't have a vision or value proposition, it is impossible to force it. Simply wanting to be an innovator is not enough.
The problem is even worse if you have management deadlines and bureaucracy. You end up simply picking the top bad idea at the next review cycle and running with it.
God, yea. I've flipped between R&D and product development a few times in my career, sometimes at the same company, and it's a really rough transition even for an individual experienced in both. I can't imagine trying to flip a whole research team to make products is going to go well, especially when the products are getting a ton of well-deserved bad press and a lot of those researchers were coming from academia rather than elsewhere in industry in the first place
One of the challenges is that there are always more smart people outside the org than in - so the chances of the same company out innovating the world again and again is slim.
On the other hand, if your management decide to cut R, and just buy in the innovation at the right time to develop it - if you don't have any internal R people trying to do the same sort of things you will find it really difficult to make the right acquisitions at the right time.
So you need both - and treading that line is really tricky.
I also think that having people with an R mindset is important - people who are interested in pushing the envelop, doing things better etc.
Having people like that in the organisation means you are less likely to be blindsided by a shift in technology that could kill the company.
I work in an organization that asks for innovation, but doesn't allocate any budget for R&D or investigative projects. The company also doesn't have any culture of being ok with taking big swings and accepting misses.
The project deck is fully loaded with status quo type projects, based on client demands. Teams are asked to track all of their hours toward these projects.
The subtext is, "Do the grunt work during your 40 hours that we're sure will generate revenue, and please, please, do something innovative on top of that on your own time/dime".
Give me just one example where that ever worked to create a viable company. Whoops, there aren‘t any. Separating research and development never really worked for anything. What do you expect, if you have a two class employment hierarchy: First, people who have all the freedom, but no responsibility or constraints, giving semi-good solutions to people who aren’t motivated to let other peoples ideas succeed with all the responsibility to make them successful but no freedom to pivot or iterate. Even if you separate them inside the same company, very rarely does something usable come out of it. Proof in case: Some of the worst, most uninnovative companies in Germany (SAP, T-Mobile, etc.) have some of the most stellar research results, papers and sought-after positions, yet they never result in successful products in practice.
> I've been trying to propose this model in the companies I've worked at - but generally there is always some Napoleone on top who vetoes risky bets or force teams to work on non productive endeavours.
You need a separate R&D division that plays by different rules than the established product division.
New product/market R&D is expensive, slow, and risky. If a company swings too far to the sales-oriented mindset, new R&D ventures can look very unappealing under typical models. Sales-minded executives would rather focus on the investments they know, such as hiring more sales people or increasing advertising expenditure.
Having a separate division responsible for R&D allows them to play by different rules and take more risky, longer-term bets. However, this is easier said than done. These R&D budgets are usually the first thing on the chopping block when sales are down and executives need to clean up the budget numbers. It's also extremely difficult to transition new products out of R&D and into their own, sustainable divisions. Some companies, executives, and engineers get hooked on tinkering with new product R&D and forget that they have to turn things into long-term product offerings. This is how you end up with constant product churn like Google's ever-expanding graveyard of abandoned products.
You're talking as if most, if not all, companies are engaging in R&D at the level of the Apollo 11 space mission. You don't need brilliant people in most cases, merely having honest, diligent, persistent normal human beings can get the job done.
I used to work for a R&D department. We created new things, but nothing went beyond a demo, or some patent applications, or company internal news. It felt that the top brass didn't actually want new things as there always was a danger of cannibalizing some legacy business.
Then I changed to consulting (midsize company, 75-300 people) and it was a breath of fresh air when there actually was a paying customer that wants a working product and will publish it. I really think we did honest, good quality work.
I had this experience in my own company for a very very brief time when we had enough money for it. We were (trying) doing innovation in the our R&D dep first but after that I tried to make that into something more. Unfortunately in a commercial entity (as is indicated in the article) this is extremely hard to do as when the time for new budgets arrives my co-founders would ask where the tangible (as in money) results were. Results did come and in the end it did actually break even but the freedom was stripped too soon to really make something happen. Sounds like the ultimate job to be honest.
And that at SAP of all places. I worked with SAP software and consultants and probably as many here who worked with SAP as well will probably agree; that is a far shout from this invent lab...
Converting that R&D into actual products and services, I'd wager, is quite difficult without a profit incentive. It's like the difference between having a great idea for a startup and actually turning it into a functioning company.
Without invoking too many absolutes, there's so much bullshit involved in the latter that people doing the former aren't willing to put up with. It's mostly two different kinds of people with two different skillsets.
It’s literally impossible to exhaust R&D Opportunities. The hard part is going from research to commercialization but the is an almost unlimited amount of innovation still possible.
And the cycle of companies who only do R&D for project based work. This is the real issue. I would say it's a problem with middle and high level management, but I am still not sure if that is fair.
I can't say I disagree with not having dedicated R&D. The notion of having an R&D department is stuck in the 1950's where the geeks and the worker bees didn't mix. Everyone should be able to and be encouraged to innovate.
Correct. Starting a company is fun, but it's not a time in which you can do research. Research is inherently risky and long-view oriented. Because startups are inherently risky and must survive in the short-term, the added risk of structuring a company around a research project is likely to lead to so much risk that no one will want to fund it.
Well-funded government labs can do R&D because they're in a low-risk position and can take the long view. A government researcher is going to keep his job regardless of whether his findings contribute to the immediate P&L, so he's able to pursue research projects that are unlikely to pay off in the short term.
Contrary to the common slight against government regarding innovation, government research projects can be highly innovative and useful. As for CEOs claiming that R&D departments are less innovative than private-sector executives, well... they're CEOs, so of course they're going to be immensely biased in favor of their own kind. Their definition of innovation is based on what they recognize as innovation, so of course most of them will underappreciate the long-term-oriented contributions of R&D.
The problem with academia, though, is that it has the worst of both worlds. It's bureaucratic and stuffy, moreso than most government research labs, but the level of risk (career death) for the aspiring professor is intolerably high, meaning that high-risk research projects are unpalatable. Academia's a sinking ship, and no longer a viable career for more than a handful of people per year. I hate to say it, but academia's best days are almost three decades behind it, by this point.
R&D labs fail at innovation because they're not designed to innovate. They're designed to invent. And they do a pretty good job at it as well.
Without R&D labs we wouldn't have digital cameras, laser printers, the GUI, the mouse, cell phones, pharmaceutical drugs, etc.
If you want a good book on the subject, grab "Open Innovation" by Chesborough. It does a good job explaining why Xerox PARC wasn't able to monetize many of its inventions even though its managers were highly competent leaders who were following the best practices of the time.
Setting up shopify integrations, building a domain name registrar, and writing new web templates is not R&D. It carries no technical risk and the product is already known to be valuable. The only chance of failure is that you build it and nobody comes to buy because there's no reason to choose you over all the other people offering the same thing.
I am sure that most software projects fail, but I am also sure that as a software developer, almost all of your work ends up in production. Sure, you will have minor technical setbacks, but not on the scale of actual R&D projects. In contrast, people doing R&D in pharma or other similar fields will spend months or years working on a single project that doesn't go anywhere because it is too hard. The same goes for civil engineers building bridges, for example: the work is highly technical, but it is not R&D.
I very much disagree with you that pushing a 10-line bugfix is anywhere near R&D. There's no uncertainty, and there is no research.
By the way, the act of thinking or problem solving does not make your work R&D. If it did, retail workers and construction workers would be doing a lot of R&D, too.
It wouldn't be either, really. The smartest people I've worked with are usually not engineers at all. I started my career working on classified defense and intelligence projects and the research scientists driving new capabilities are still the only people I've ever encountered in any line of work doing things that I legitimately felt it would take me a decade to understand. Think for instance of everything Claude Shannon did while he was at Bell Labs.
Of the two, though, obviously larger companies are more likely to even be able to fund truly novel research compared to a startup. There's only so much you can do under the constraint that anything you build has to be a component of a usable product you can plausibly sell to a defined market in the next six months.
I know a few people who work in R&D who are quite good at their activities.
They can usually turn around an effective product in at max a year.
They usually create a set of underlying patents, this takes maybe a year of reading academic journals and thinking of your physics and me guys, and then you usually have a theory you can put in practice.
Apparently, all they need from there is a trip to home depot, one or two things off amazon, and a PCB designed and printed. From there, they can make a wide range of products.
One small invention can be used as the underbelly for many, many pieces of technology; everything that comes as a result usually also has one or two applications to research or defense. This means big money.
Most real R&D is self sustaining, so long as you have a team that can sell.
The hard part of R&D is getting the right people in my mind.
I've had this conversation with many people, and it usually helps to ask this: has anyone you have met who works in R&D said they didn't like their job?
Whatever your views on the patent system, I think its worth thinking about companies like this, that just have engineers who do R&D without being backed by big sales and marketing teams. There is a lot of value to business models like this one (and ARM, etc). They don't need to think about users, scaling, marketing, etc, just the technology. Its not good for innovation if the only companies that can make money off R&D are ones that build end-user products to put it into, because ultimately the optimal conditions for many kinds of R&D aren't all that compatible with the conditions in product-focused organizations.
The problem is essentially the corporate equivalent of people who post on HN saying they want to make a startup but have no good ideas. If you don't have a vision or value proposition, it is impossible to force it. Simply wanting to be an innovator is not enough.
The problem is even worse if you have management deadlines and bureaucracy. You end up simply picking the top bad idea at the next review cycle and running with it.
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