Research Restructuring and Assessment Can We Apply the Corporate Experience to Government Agencies? (1995) / Chapter Skim
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5 Research Restructuring and Assessment at Xerox
5 Research Restructuring and Assessment at Xerox
Pages 36-44
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From page 36... ...
The entire Corporate Research and Technology operation represents about 25 percent of the R&D dollars inside Xerox, which means that 75 percent of all of development is done in the business divisions. Why did we not push everything into the business divisions' or why did we move from a place that was almost all centralized to spreading a lot more of it out in the business divisions?
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From page 37... ...
Researchers need to learn that they are not the only creative people and that, in fact, the amount of creativity it takes to unfreeze the corporate mind and to get a radical new idea accepted requires some innovative "out-of-the-box" thinking, just as the original invention did. Although this is an obvious business goal, it actually starts to change the way we, as researchers, view ourselves.
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From page 38... ...
~. ~A.^ ~ ~ ~_^ V _ ~ ~ ~ ~r~ru snort for us was lo view corporate research and technology, especially corporate research in this case, not just as creating new technologies, but also as taking on the task of creating, in addition to technologies, new businesses and new business models.
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From page 39... ...
I am suggesting that you start out very connected to a set of real-world research problems, then you pull back and become disconnected as you go to the root of those problems, and then you reconnect when you have solved the fundamental problem that you are going after. The reason I think this is important is that a corporate research organization must have the freedom to disconnect as well as connect, and this is only likely when research is separated from the daily crises of creating products in a business division.
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From page 40... ...
If you think about it, we are not worth much as researchers if our intuitions are not honed, and honing intuitions takes time. So, there is, I think, a good reason to expect that the research community should be fairly conservative.
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From page 41... ...
Is it not curious that both of us talk about communications as a major barrier in making our corporations more effective Yet neither of us funds basic research into how to create shared understanding across the organization? I will conclude with five suggestions for the National Science Foundation: defense.
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From page 42... ...
Instead of asking our fundamental researchers what have they done for the company, we ask them how they have leveraged the company to advance their own ideas. As soon as researchers start thinking about that, they realize that these other corporate people are allies and they ought to start learning their language.
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From page 43... ...
How much is set aside at NSF for people who want to challenge fundamental background assumptions? Do you set aside money to probe the fringes, especially cross-disciplinary ones?
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