Lab Rats Attack the CIO World

I often work in telecommunications and the company's gold standard R&D laboratory has always been Bell Labs. These people have created amazing things that we all take for granted today: transistors, optical fiber, etc.

Because most companies do not know what to do with their company's research facilities, responsibility for laboratories is often under the control of the CIO (because most companies also do not know what to do with IT). Nice. So what should a CIO do when he is in charge of the company's R&D laboratories?

Their time is a change

So why do companies set up their research laboratories? Simple, they need a source of innovation that they can use to be more successful. Unfortunately, the Internet came and the wheels fell from this truck.

In the past (early 90s), researchers used social networks to exchange information and push their research forward. No, not Facebook or Twitter - we are talking about the early 90s here. They use REAL social networks that are formed when researchers go to conferences or meet in the lunch room.

The arrival of the Internet has turned this world upside down. If you can connect with anyone through the Internet, then why do you bother having a company R&D laboratory?

It turns out there is still a reason for the company's R&D laboratories, it's just that they will become much smaller and the value of even having an R&D laboratory will go nissui idonesia down.

CIO and the New Era of R&D

Steve Lohr in the New York Times has talked with people in the corporate R&D world to find out what the future of R&D Labs will be like.

Pull the lid off the R&D lab and you will find a machine that can turn ideas into products. In the future, ideas that business can turn into products (which are business goals in business) will not come from laboratories, instead they will come from all directions. Wow, so messy.

In the future the company will not be able to have an old-style R&D laboratory. This laboratory is paid for by company profits. Once again, the terrible problem of the Internet has come and generalized the arena of the game and the company's profits are now under pressure from everywhere. Now that they are gone, there is no way to pay for old-style R&D.

A new way (practiced by HP, GE, and IBM) is for CIOs to change what the company's R&D laboratories do. The new role for R&D laboratories is to act as a communication center between researchers who can all be placed in remote locations.

Sources of new ideas can be from universities, new companies, other businesses, and even government laboratories. Researchers need to start acting like human Googles and start siphoning all the information they need to create products that can be sold by their companies.

Last thought

CIOs who find themselves responsible for the company's R&D laboratories have difficult challenges in their hands. No matter how successful the lab was in the past, the past is the past and what works then it will no longer function. CIOs need to move aggressively to change the way R&D research is conducted.

Realizing that the Internet changed everything, CIOs had to create a logical "R&D and speaking" design in which the company's R&D team channeled communication between various parties to encourage innovation. Eventually, when enough information has been collected to enable a product to be made, a CIO will know that its R&D lab does what needs to be done.