Escaped from the Lab: OOPSLA Workshop Report

In this workshop, the workshop participants explored several interesting questions surrounding the subject of Innovation and how to get new ideas from the laboratory (universities and corporate research labs) into practical uses.

The top questions were:

• How do innovations escape?
• What are the values, culture, and climate that contribute to successful innovation?
• How can we attract and retain innovators?
• Industry people are the "customers" of innovators -- so what should industry do to be a good customer?
• Are there special considerations for research that is contracted or outsourced?
• How should we measure the impact of innovation?

How do innovations escape?

To have success in the real-world application of an innovation goes beyond the capability of most research organizations. You often need help from the outside.

• You can think of making a bridge from Research to Development
• Moving innovations into practice requires people.

One conclusion -- technology transfer is a collaborative effort.

• It is important to form alliances, work with others to get the word out about an innovation
• Innovations often come up against problems because of the fear of change -- resistance.
• There are good ideas about surmounting resistance to change in the book Fearless Change by Mary Lynn Manns and Linda Rising.

Another good observation -- in some cases, successful technology transfer has happened by transferring people (sometimes on a temporary basis):

• Interns (graduate students working for a company to help the tech transfer)
• Professors on a sabbatical
• Industry people working in an academic lab on a short-term fellowship
• Bringing in innovators in a consultant role for a short term

Values, culture, and climate that contribute to successful innovation?

This was an interesting topic to explore. Some obvious factors have played a role in building an environment for innovation:

• Geography can be really important. There is often a geographic clustering of firms that are involved in similar technology work. This attracts many innovators to work for companies in that geographic cluster.
  • Example: In Netherlands, there is a cluster of companies around Eindhoven that do work on embedded systems -- especially with the auto industry in that region. On the other hand, there are very few software developers with real-time development experience in Amsterdam, because the main focus in that region is the banking industry.
• Government policies can help or hinder the climate for innovation. Regulations, tax policy, compliance rules affect the businesses directly. Some other legal issues, such as government regulations that affect employee benefits -- rules that make medical benefits and retirement benefits more portable -- can also help innovation.
• Finally, the attitudes and primary motivators of researchers and innovators are an element in the values and climate. Researchers look at the culture in their local work environment and ask "what is in it for me?" They are often looking to balance risks and insecurities in their careers on one side -- and on the other, incentives such as career advancement, building their resumes, and having fun. Many innovators also put some weight to "idealism", the idea that their innovations can help to save the planet.

How can we attract and retain innovators?

We assembled a list of things that attract good technical people to work for a company:

• technical ladder -- Does a company have a series of ranks that a technical person can advance through in their careers?
• compensation: salary, bonuses, stock options, medical benefits, vacation
• the opportunity to work with other good people
• leadership opportunities (this might not be in management -- it might just be the chance to be a technical team leader)
• mentoring opportunities -- the chance to be recognized by others as a guru
• becoming a thought leader
• opportunities for personal development -- lifelong learning
• interesting work challenges
• trips to conferences -- especially OOPSLA
• appreciation by peers and managers

We listed a few things that repel good technical people:

• managers who give "unreasonable challenges"
  • For example: Some managers will assign some "stretch goals" to each member of the team, and then punish them in their ratings for not achieving the goals.
• managers who micro-manage
• inflexibility in performance management
  • For example: In many companies, the manager and employee decide on performance goals at the beginning of the year. If the projects change during the year, the goals are renegotiated. The worst thing is if the employee is held to the original performance goals.
• a job environment where innovators are put on the "front line" of dealing with customers -- without any management help to bridge the communications gap between development and customer

What should industry do to be a good customer of innovations?

In some companies, a common model for introducing new innovations is to work with a "research partner" -- which might be either a research group in a university or a small startup company.

There is always a give and take between:

• technology users -- a company that needs some innovations / solutions to solve some of their problems
• researchers (in a university or small company) -- they have some kind of generic solution, but they want to work with a practical problem to test the real-world feasibility of their technology

Some interesting problems that might cause some "mismatched expectations":

• Will a business person be capable of evaluating a research asset? (Do they have enough knowledge and experience to tell if the asset solves their current problem?)
  • This is a big issue. Some companies have tried to reduce costs by eliminating most of their internal research and making contracts with universities and contract research labs. This model can work -- but if the company can't tell the difference between a valuable innovation and a lemon, they will struggle.
• Who has the responsibility to show that the research product (or prototype) is suitable for the practical problem? The main answer we came up with: it depends on whether you are in a "pull" or a "push" scenario.
  • Pull scenario: Industry asks the researchers to adapt their assets to solve a particular industrial problem. In the pull model, it is the industry customer who needs to do "due diligence" to ensure that the research prototype will
  • Push scenario: Researchers are anxious to get some real-world users, so they "push" ideas into practical uses. In the push model, researchers need to gain an extra understanding of the objectives and context of the users.

Research that is contracted or outsourced

We discussed some of the models of industry-university collaboration. This collaboration could be done in a couple of ways:

• a company makes a research grant - This is the simplest to administer: the innovations that result from the grant either become public domain or the property of the university, and most of the control of the research work is in the hands of the principal investigator.
• a company and a university research group negotiate a contract - This is more complicated, and there are many things to be decided in the contract:
  • Who owns the intellectual property for the innovations at the end of the contract?
    (In some universities, specifically in institutions who have been active in agricultural and biomedical research, the university may have policies that require research contracts to assign intellectual property rights to the university. In schools with strong engineering departments, it is more common to have policies that allow the industrial funders to own some or all of the intellectual assets created under the contract.)
  • Will university researchers be able to publish research papers about the innovations?
    (Researchers want to have minimal restrictions on publishing research results -- this has to be balanced with the possibilities of getting patent or copyright protection for some of the research results.)
  • What intermediate deliveries will be produced, and are they prototypes or products?
    (The contract should balance the researchers' interests in exploring new technologies and the company's interests in solving specific technical problems.)

One of the workshop participants, Ethan Hadar from CA Labs, presented one model that is used to manage industry-university collaboration -- in an Agile manner. In this model, there are five main players -- three on the industry side and two on the university side.

• Professor (manages the research on the university side)
• Student researcher (performs most of the research work on the university side)
• Industry collaborator (usually a technical-professional in the company that is using the research in an industrial application -- this person works closely with the Student researcher)
• Industry line manager (usually the direct line manager of the Industry collaborator -- provides the funding for the research program)
• Research manager (a manager on the industry side who has special expertise in overseeing the research program -- collaborates with both the Student researcher and Industry collaborator to make sure that the organizational objectives are met on both sides)

One more point was raised in the discussion of this question -- how to move "customer-generated innovations" into a product. We talked about two slightly different models:

• Matlab model -- Matlab accepts customer-built add-ons to their product, but they have an internal staff that performs the required "product hardening" to integrate the new features into the next Matlab product release.
• SAP model -- SAP allows customers to produce SAP extensions that will be included in future SAP product releases. The development work is done by the customer -- with support and assistance from SAP architects.

Both of these models seem to work OK, but there is definitely a different division of responsibility for the productization work.

How should we measure the impact of innovation?

Measuring the impact is a good idea -- even the only measurements we can make are simplistic.

We considered three sets of measurements:

• Individual measurements -- measurements that an individual innovator might use to track their own effectiveness, or that might be part of a laboratory's evaluation of individuals. This set of measurements is not surprising:
  • academic papers
  • patents
  • building something that makes a difference (to a business partner, customer, open source community, ...)
  • the amount of fun
• Organizational measurements -- there are two sets of measurements we considered. The first set is pretty traditional: based on ordinary economic value:
  • new products
  • new customers and markets
  • increased market share
• The second set of Organizational measurements are more interesting -- and surprising:
  • ability of the organization to attract new employees -- new innovators
    • It might not be so important for every innovation to make a big profit -- for example, for Google Labs, they might be willing to use some less profitable innovations to build their reputation as a great place to work. This could draw enough new innovators to be a net gain in total business value.
  • mind share -- this is an idea from the world of free/open source products
    • There is a potential future market to be won when you convince customers and users that your set of tools is good to use, because it is free. For example, Eclipse has gained a large "mind share" because of its economic model, and this will result in the sales of more commercial Eclipse spinoffs for some companies.
• Government measurements -- these are the measurements that a government might watch to decide the impact of some of their policies that affect innovation
  • increased employment in the country or in selected regions
  • increase in GDP
  • strategic position
  • building a set of intellectual property for the country's industries

What other questions do we have?

In the workshop's initial brainstorming session, we came up with a number of other good topics to discuss. Unfortunately, because of the lack of time, we put these questions off until another future workshop:

Questions and issues on innovation for future discussion:

• Time to value
• How do we improve our hit rate?
• Creativity -- innovation needs "creativity" and "organization" in balance
• Definition of innovation
• Roadblocks to innovation
• Innovations and new ideas from unlikely sources -- such as customer support
• What to do when someone overcommits
• Acquisition and partnering -- what are the positives and negatives?
• Innovation mechanisms -- how do you search for innovations and plan for them
• Methods of influence