In decades past, the concept of Research and Development was strictly the purview of companies with a reason to invent new products or raw materials. Today, every company over ten employees better take a page from that history and come up with a system for Technology R&D (tR&D.) Whereas raw materials for R&D used to be new chemical combinations, the raw materials of today are new software combinations.  Where there once were scientists in lab coats, there are now GenYer’s with iPads. Don’t take what I propose lightly for the following reasons…

Technology as a set of tools continues to explode in the number of new options available, and in many cases, these new tools are inexpensive or free. The pace of innovation and production is continuing to speed up – ergo the toolbox grows. Since the caveman days, the species with the best use of tools has dominated. Many centuries ago technology (starting with the development of metals and gun powder) changed the political fortunes of the countries, or despots that wielded them. In the business world for the past 50 years, companies that adopted new technologies before their competitors prospered. As the toolbox grows, the opportunity for the innovative use of these tools also expands. As more companies use more tools, those that do not, will be punished at a more painful rate.

Take social technologies for example. This is a much broader and more powerful set of tools than most leaders realize. They will change dramatically large swaths of how we operate in society and in organizations. As with any powerful tool, the faster an organization can learn to use it effectively, the more benefit they will gain over competitors. Today, while some companies are still trying to figure out Facebook and Twitter, others are on to Online Reputation Management, Social CRM, Crowdsourcing, and building Rivers of Information. I still run into organizations and leaders who believe that social tech is a fad, and that we will go back to traditional ways of interacting. That is about as smart as believing that pneumatic nail guns are a fad and we will go back to hammers.

The same could be said for cloud computing, augmented reality or mobile applications. These are all just tools, and too many organizations are failing to pull out value from the toolbox and reap the rewards. It used to be possible to sit back and believe that you could learn all the best practices from your competitors. That letting the market define the path forward was a safe play – especially if you were a large organization that was risk averse. The problem now is that in the time it takes you to be taught by others, you might have lost a painful amount of market share to those that are using tools before you.

In short, I find this to be a huge failure of leadership in most cases – literally ignoring the fact that the toolbox is exploding with possibility because they think success is a birthright and it will go on forever. For this reason, I suggest that every organization put in a formal tR&D process so they can quickly and maturely have a way to discover new viable technologies and processes and apply them early when they will have a magnified value. This process will reap huge return on investment and may just protect some companies from starvation (extinction.)

In my next blog, I will review the steps in the tR&D process…

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com