Boosting R&D productivity

Here is an article from the McKinsey Quartely on a topic of great personal interest to me: how to boost performance of R&D workers.  I believe knowledge barriers are increasingly important in increasingly complex and increasingly virtual R&D teams and have written about it quite often.  Clearly, the idea of forming focused virtual communities is new to many R&D executives:

Nonetheless, many executives have a hazy understanding of what it takes to bolster productivity for knowledge workers. This lack of clarity is partly because knowledge work involves more diverse and amorphous tasks than do production or clerical positions, where the relatively clear-cut, predictable activities make jobs easier to automate or streamline. Likewise, performance metrics are hard to come by in knowledge work, making it challenging to manage improvement efforts (which often lack a clear owner in the first place).

The article points out five significant barriers to effective R&D community building and what to do about them:

  1. Physical: As I have discussed in the past, even R&D workers separated by just one floor become more or less virtually connected.  The article suggest building communities of practice (COP).  However, COP need help to overcome barriers 2, 4 and 5 below.
  2. Technical: Much R&D collaboration involves different technical disciplines.  Each technology has its own specific jargon.  It is quite difficult to have effective communications across different different disciplines.  The article suggests role rotation as a possible solution.  However, these rotations are expensive and provide mixed results because of 4 and 5 below.
  3. Social / Cultural: Pretty obvious for multi-national teams.  However, as I have pointed out, significant cultural differences exist between two different organizations (such as marketing and manufacturing) in the same office.  The article again focuses on COP.  In my experience, COP are a good start, but not the ultimate answer to addressing social barriers.
  4. Contextual: This to me is the most important barrier.  Most R&D communication occurs through documents (reports, papers, etc.).  These communications describe the results, but rarely provide the context of why particular decisions were made.  Some of it is between different technologies or organizations (2 and 3 above), but the barrier is even more critical to team members in the same discipline… The article focuses on forums and meetings as a possible solution.  I do not think you can understand the context of another discipline through meetings.  
  5. Time: Given enough time, it is possible to overcome the barriers above.  However, there is never enough time.  Most people need the right information, at the right level of detail – instantaneously. The article suggests a central database of learnings.  I think that is a great idea.  However, it is critical to structure the database so that the information is easily accessible.  That is easier said than done.
I believe that our solution provides a revolutionary new approach to address all of these barriers…

R&D Executive Leadership

I have always been fascinated by the trend to blame and praise business leaders in the USA.  I have often wondered how anyone can justify paying a CEO as much as several hundred engineers.  Here is an excellent blog post by Prof. Sutton of Stanford University.

James Meindl’s research on “the romance of leadership” shows that leaders get far more credit—and blame—than they deserve, largely because, cognitively, it is easier and more emotionally satisfying to treat leadership as the primary cause of performance than to consider the convoluted and often subtle mishmash of factors that actually determine performance differences.

And there is some empirical evidence of the impact leaders have:

…many studies show that for more than 75 percent of employees, dealing with their immediate boss is the most stressful part of the job. Lousy bosses can kill you—literally. A 2009 Swedish study tracking 3,122 men for ten years found that those with bad bosses suffered 20 to 40 percent more heart attacks than those with good bosses.

I have slowly realized that organizations take on the culture of their leaders and behave like them. For example, in many service organization such as legal or management consulting, everyone is driven to become a partner. They do whatever it takes to make themselves look good to the partners – all the while complaining that people are not being rewarded for their skills, but on how they “kiss up to” the partners. Even so, when the become partners, they actually repeat the same behavior…

Linda Hudson, CEO of BAE Systems, got this message after becoming the first female president of General Dynamics. After her first day on the job, a dozen women in her office imitated how she tied her scarf. Hudson realized, “It really was now about me and the context of setting the tone for the organization. That was a lesson I have never forgotten—that as a leader, people are looking at you in a way that you could not have imagined in other roles.” Hudson added that such scrutiny and the consequent responsibility is “something that I think about virtually every day.”

So, what is a leader to do? Here are Prof. Sutton’s suggestions:

  1. Take Control
    1. Express confidence even when you don’t feel it
    2. Don’t Dither
    3. Get and Give Credit
    4. Blame Yourself
  2. Bolster Performance
    1. Provide Psychological Saftey
    2. Shield People
    3. Make Small Gestures
In case you want more, here are many more related posts…

Bacteria evolve a way to share electrons

This is just amazing: Bacteria evolve a way to share electrons: “

Life is powered by the shuffling of electrons. When organisms break down a food source like a sugar, they’re really extracting high-energy electrons, which they shuffle down through intermediate proteins before they end up in a final electron acceptor. For most of the life we’re familiar with, that acceptor is oxygen. But for various microbes that thrive in the absence of oxygen, a variety of other chemicals are used. 

In the current paper, the authors forced two different species of bacteria to live in an anaerobic environment, and provided them with ethanol as food. Initially, they grew very poorly. After several transfers, however, the rate of growth improved, and small, colored nodules began to appear in the culture, which contained a mix of the two types of bacteria. The authors checked a number of the chemicals that are typically used to transfer electrons in these symbiotic cultures, but saw no evidence of their being used. 

To figure out what was going on, they did whole-genome sequencing, and found only one change: a single base missing in the gene for a protein that regulates RNA production. Making a similar mutation in another strain also allowed those bacteria to form quick-growing nodules. The mutation appears to cause proteins involved in electron transfer to be expressed at increased levels. These proteins end up on pilli, arm-like structures that extend out from the bacteria.

Nokia’s Bureaucracy Stifled Innovation

This New York Times article on Nokia’s Bureaucracy Stifled Innovation has several interesting lessons for R&D managers.  It appears that Nokia had a smart phone before others, but cancelled it:

A few years before Apple introduced the iPhone in early 2007, the prototype of an Internet-ready, touch-screen handset with a large display made the rounds among upper management at Nokia. The prototype developed by Nokia’s research centers in Finland was seen as a potential breakthrough by its engineers that would have given the world’s biggest maker of mobile phones a powerful advantage in the fast-growing smartphone market.

I am not sure that having a prototype in 2004 and choosing not to bring it to market was such a bad decision. Apple itself had a prototype for a smart phone working with a large consumer electronics company in 2004.  They too chose not to bring it to market.  I do not think technology existed to actually build successful smart phones in 2004 – that included fast enough processors, low power LED backlit screens and abundant DRAM/FLASH. R&D Managers need to make touch choices at times and they can all not be the right choices.  This one example does not directly prove that all decisions made at Nokia were bad – or that even this decision was a bad one.

On the other hand, the article mentions a couple of times that Nokia got complacent because of its own success:

… former employees depicted an organization so swollen by its early success that it grew complacent, slow and removed from consumer desires. As a result, they said, Nokia lost the lead in several crucial areas by failing to fast-track its designs for touch screens, software applications and 3-D interfaces.

Or

“Nokia in a sense is a victim of its own success,” said Jyrki Ali-Yrkko, an economist at the private Research Institute of the Finnish Economy. “It stayed with its playbook too long and didn’t change with the times. Now it’s time to make changes.”
This is clearly a problem.  How do R&D mangers keep from falling into this trap?  I guess one has a better more formal portfolio balancing process that allows decisions to be based on qualitative and quantitative criteria that can be discussed rationally.  This was NOT the case at Nokia:

Juhani Risku, a manager who worked on user interface designs for Symbian from 2001 to 2009, said his team had offered 500 proposals to improve Symbian but could not get even one through.

“It was management by committee,” Mr. Risku said, comparing the company’s design approval processes to a “Soviet-style” bureaucracy. Ideas fell victim to fighting among managers with competing agendas, he said, or were rejected as too costly, risky or insignificant for a global market leader. Mr. Risku said he had left in frustration at its culture; he now designs environmentally sound buildings.

The key phrase in portfolio balancing is BOTH qualitative and quantitative criteria.  A strict focus on ROI will kill high-risk high-return innovative projects.  Fundamental technology development is also a difficult area to measure ROI because technology has impact on multiple products and ROI is impossible to compute (Symbian could be seen as a fundamental technology with impact on multiple product platforms):

Proposals were often rejected because their payoffs were seen as too small, he said. But “successful innovations often begin small and become very big.”

 In fact, R&D managers should set a portion of their budgets for innovation (10-20%).  These projects should not have any ROI requirements.  Another way to encourage manager risk taking is to reward failure.

In 2004, one said, the company rejected an early design for a Nokia online applications store — an innovation that Apple, Nokia and other handset makers adopted three years later. Nokia also did not improve its Symbian operating system, needed to support a more sophisticated smartphone. And though it introduced the industry’s first touch-screen devices in 2003 — the 6108 and 3108 phones, which worked with a stylus — it did not perfect the technology to fingertip precision before Apple did.
Finally, may be more access to outside innovation would help (may be open innovation or borderless innovation?)

Meetings are a waste of time

Here is some data that would make your day  First a survey that suggests Businesses Waste 4.8 Hours Per Week Scheduling Meetings:

By the time the year ends, many have spent the cumulative equivalent of six weeks scheduling meetings, and that doesn’t include time spent attending them.

That sounds excessive and not realistic.  But what do I know…  On the same note, here are some suggestions from HBR to improve reduce waste with my 2 cents added:

  • Meetings always shorter than 90 minutes
  • Meeting materials delivered at least day before and everyone comes prepared
  • One page executive summary for the briefing package that everyone must read
  • Clearly defined roles and responsibilities for each participant in the meeting (no one attends the meeting unless they have a stake)
  • Predefined agenda for the meeting (no meeting requests without agenda)
  • Clear conclusion at the end of the meeting (As per HBR: Where are we going to go from here? What are the to-dos and who is going to do them? When will they be delivered?)
I remember reading and article about how P&G’s strategic reviews took place.  The business unit sent out the briefing package at least a week before the review.  All obvious questions were discussed over email.  The meeting was for making decisions and having real debates.  I really like that idea.

Impact of Incentive Bonus Plan

Here is a cool article from Management Science on Empirical Examination of Goals and Performance-to-Goal Following the Introduction of an Incentive Bonus Plan with Participative Goal Setting:

Prior research documents performance improvements following the implementation of pay-for-performance (PFP) bonus plans. However, bonus plans typically pay for performance relative to a goal, and the manager whose performance is to be evaluated often participates in setting the goal. In these settings, PFP affects managers’ incentive to influence goal levels in addition to affecting performance effort. Prior field research is silent on the effect of PFP on goals, the focus of this paper.

The authors studied retails store performance (I believe retail stores have a much better handle on performance bonuses than most R&D organizations I know)

Using sales and sales goal data from 61 stores of a U.S. retail firm over 10 quarters, we find that the introduction of a performance-based bonus plan with participative goal setting is accompanied by lower goals that are more accurate predictors of subsequent sales performance. Statistical tests indicate that increased goal accuracy is attributable to managers ‘meeting but not beating’ goals and to new information being impounded in goals.

So, managers lower the goals and then meet them!

we find that prior period performance has incremental power to explain goal levels in the postplan period. Our results provide field-based evidence that PFP and participative goal setting affect the level and accuracy of goals, effects that are associated with both information exchange and with managers’ incentives to influence goals.

Take home message is to be very careful with setting up an incentive bonus plan.  In R&D organizations, it is even more difficult because the results are often not measurable and incentives tend to get disconnected from performance to start with.  Please let me know if you would like to discuss this further.

Specification and Design of Embedded Hardware-Software Systems

For last few months, I have been working on developing a new design flow that brings ASIC like reuse and semiconductor like cost curve to all R&D.  The idea is that semiconductors have increased in complexity and performance exponentially, while costs has come down continuously.  How can we replicate the same for all system R&D?

One of the earliest papers on the topic was  Specification and Design of Embedded Hardware-Software Systems.  In retrospect, the place where it should have come up first anyway – system where electronics/semiconductor and other technologies interact.

“System specification and design consists of describing a system’s desired functionality, and of mapping that functionality for implementation on a set of system components, such as processors, ASIC’s, memories, and buses. In this article, we describe the key problems of system specification and design, including specification capture, design exploration, hierarchical modeling, software and hardware synthesis, and cosimulation. We highlight existing tools and methods for solving those problems, and we discuss issues that remain to be solved.”

The paper suggests five tasks:

  1. Specification capture: Specify desired system functionality
  2. Exploration: Explore design alternatives
  3. Specification refinement: Refine specifications based on exploration
  4. Software & Hardware design:
  5. Physical design:
Much more on this in the future.  But a good paper to start thinking about things.

Top 10 R&D spending Firms

Some good benchmarking data from Booz & Co. and Christian Science Monitor at R&D spending: Here are the Top 10 firms:

Apple, Google, and 3M may top Bloomberg’s list of the world’s most innovative companies, but they’re not the biggest research and development spenders – not even part of the Top 20. Out of 1,000 publicly traded companies with the highest R&D spending in 2009, here are the Top 10, according to a survey by management-consulting firm Booz & Co.

Here is the list for 2009 R&D budgets(Clearly dominated by Drug companies):

  1. Roche Holding $9.b
  2. Microsoft $9B
  3. Nokia $8.6B
  4. Toyota $7.8B
  5. Pfizer $7.7B
  6. Novartis $7.5B
  7. Johnson & Johnson $7B
  8. Sanofi-Aventis $6.3B
  9. GlaxoSmithKline $6.2B
  10. Samsung $6B

China’s Drones Raise Eyebrows at Air Show – WSJ.com


Here is an interesting article in the WSJ with significant impact on long-term R&D strategy: China’s Drones Raise Eyebrows at Air Show. 

Western defense officials and experts were surprised to see more than 25 different Chinese models of the unmanned aircraft, known as UAVs, on display at this week’s Zhuhai air show in this southern Chinese city. It was a record number for a country that unveiled its first concept UAVs at the same air show only four years ago, and put a handful on display at the last one in 2008.”

Amazing progress on Chinese front. During the cold war, USA and Russia kept pumping money into R&D.  This long-term research provided sustainable lead to countries and was a source of significant innovations such as ASICs, Interenet, etc.
I think the difference between the cold war and now is the significant increase in the rate at which technology is changing. Slow progress over decades just won’t be sufficient against newcomers because they will be starting from a much more advanced computing platform.  They will be able to model new environments/materials and manufacture with increasingly more capable machines.  In fact, in many cases a long legacy is  a drag on new innovations.
The answer, however, is not the complete elimination of long-range research.  The answer is to develop more robust R&D plans, so that impact of changes in one technology can be propagated quickly across the entire system development.  The answer also is a frequent re-balance of R&D portfolios to account for changing technology/market/geopolitical landscapes.
I guess R&D managers need even more powerful tools and processes.

NSF Innovation Survey

The National Science Foundation has released preliminary results of their innovation survey: nsf.gov – SRS NSF Releases New Statistics on Business Innovation – US National Science Foundation (NSF). Below are some important take aways:
Defintion of what is innovation:

In the Oslo framework, innovation is the implementation of a new or significantly improved product (good or service), or process, a new marketing method, or a new organizational method in business practices, workplace organization or external relations.”[6] Further, “The minimum requirement for an innovation is that the product, process, marketing method or organizational method must be new (or significantly improved) to the firm. This includes products, processes, and methods that firms are the first to develop and those that have been adopted from other firms or organizations.

Lots of interesting data.  Definitely a source to get back to whenever you are trying to benchmark innovation.