management

The 4 Rules for Success with Global Teams

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By Greg Holden, Business Writer and Social Media Manager, IRI

Technology lets us do amazing things. Where once a research and development (R&D) team needed to be located in the same facility in order to collaborate, today, the sight of engineers collaborating with globally distributed coworkers via IT tools is quite common. But this dispersion of staff poses challenges of its own. For instance, when you have yet to meet one of your co-workers in person, how do you develop trust with her? When you share an office space it’s easy to casually pass along concerns, observations, insights, or interesting findings to your colleagues around a water cooler. Is it possible to replicate this with global teams? Not really. So communication is dampened on a global team. Based on research at the Industrial Research Institute (IRI), these challenges have been studied and some general rules about building a successful global team have been laid out. Continue reading →

What I Learned About Hiring Top Technical Talent

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By Igor M. Sill, Managing Director of Geneva Venture Management and Geneva Venture Partners

The ability to recruit exceptionally talented and capable management leaders is possibly the purest form of exceptional entrepreneurship and the key to organizational success. The correlation between today’s most successful technology companies and their executive team is clearly the founder’s ability to hire world-class leadership and management.

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Understanding the People You Manage

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By Michael Maccoby, President, The Maccoby Group

A large part of your job as a research/technology manager is understanding people, not just evaluating how well they have performed. Evaluation is the easy part; much harder is predicting how people will perform in new roles.

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Failing Brilliantly

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By Greg Holden, Business Writer & Social Media Manager, IRI

The mantra “fail fast, fail often” has almost become cliché in industry, yet it is a concept that innovation leaders still struggle to implement effectively at their firms. It is not hard to see why. Failure is difficult for everyone, even when they are told it’s no big deal. Tony Singarayar, Founding Partner of Analogy Partners, LLC, touched on this during a panel discussion at an IRI meeting when he spoke about the problems that can arise when innovation leaders get moved up from a research position to a management role. He said, “What’s the cost of failing? Even though the company says, ‘Oh, fail fast, fail often. No problem. You’re an investment not a failure.’ It feels like a failure when you fail… so how do we really make these people feel like investments and not failures?”

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The 3 “Shu-Be’s” for Better Talent Management

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By Greg Holden, Business Writer & Social Media Manager, IRI

As an American with a non-American spouse, I hold that unique position of being called out when I am not speaking proper English. In its place, I am told, is “American Midwest English,” a form of easily understood mumbling—if you also happen to be American. For instance, I was asked once if my car was in the parking lot outside a friend’s place where we were gathering, I responded with a shrug, saying that it “should be.” Only it came out, as it does for many Americans, “shu-be.” My non-American spouse, who was there with me, smiled and sang the words “shoo-be-doobie-dooo.” She was very amused with herself.

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New Products: What Distinguishes the Winners?

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(This article is a throwback that was originally published in 1990 by Robert G. Cooper in Research-Technology Management (RTM). This article was the winner of the 1991 Maurice Holland Award. For a more recent look at Dr. Cooper’s writings in RTM, check out Vol. 60, No. 1 #Happy60thRTM!)

By Robert G. Cooper

An accurate understanding of why new products succeed or fail is vital to improving new product performance:  Continue reading →

Managing Open Innovation

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chesbrough_henry(This is a throwback article from the January-February 2004 issue of Research-Technology Management and is the second publication made by Henry Chesbrough on the topic of Open Innovation after publishing his book in which he coined the term. It is adapted from a presentation he delivered at IRI’s 2003 Annual Meeting in Colorado Springs, CO. For the latest RTM article by Henry Chesbrough, check out the January-February 2017 issue, open to the public for a limited time!)

By Henry Chesbrough

Not long ago, internal research and development was viewed as a strategic asset, and even a barrier to competitive entry in many industries. Only large companies with significant resources and long-term research programs could compete. Research-based companies like DuPont, Merck, IBM, GE, and AT&T did the most research in their respective industries. And they earned most of the profits as well. Rivals who sought to unseat these firms had to ante up their own resources, and create their own labs, if they were to have any chance against these leaders. Today, the former leading industrial enterprises are encountering remarkably strong competition from many newer companies.   Continue reading →

The 3 Big Myths of Sparking Creativity at Work

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By Greg Holden, Business Writer & Social Media Manager, IRI

How do you spark creativity at work? This is a question as old as business itself and a topic of extensive research that has yet to be answered conclusively. What has been turned up through decades of study, however, is at least a cursory rebuttal of several big myths about how to encourage workers to be more creative. In a nutshell, creativity cannot be forced, only coaxed out of its hiding place with proper incentives.

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50 Years of Change in Industrial Research and Technology Management

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By Charles F. Larson

(This throwback article originally appeared in the 2007 January-February issue of RTM as part of the journal’s 50th anniversary.)

Leaving Purdue in the spring of 1958, I had no idea that an organization called the Industrial Research Institute (IRI) had just launched the first issue of a new journal called Research Management (RM). The chair of the Editorial Advisory Board explained that this new publication was initiated because “we need one place to turn for the latest ideas regarding research management.” RM was, of course, sent to all Representatives of IRI, but it was also intended for use by research leaders in university and government labs, with an annual subscription price of $7.50. At that time, industrial R&D investment was $3.6 billion, total R&D investment in the United States was $10 billion, and the average salary of an R&D professional was $9,000. Continue reading →

The Management of Research When Research-Technology Management Was Born

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By Michael F. Wolff, Executive Editor, RTM (1983-2010)

(This throwback article appeared in RTM twice, first in 1983 and again in 2007 as part of the journal’s 50th anniversary. This year marks the 60th year that RTM has been in continuous publication. #Happy60thRTM!)

In 1958, the industrial boom fueled by the technical advances of the World War II period was only temporarily interrupted by a recession year. The earlier dramatic research advances in computers, chemistry and electronics continued to contribute strongly to the growth of R&D management as a profession—one that brought with it concerns that resonate with those that confront the profession today.

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