The Future of R&D Has Arrived

A short excerpt from something I wrote for
Fabriquer le futur
L’imaginaire au service de l’innovation
(Creating the Future: The Imagination in service to Innovation)
By Pierre Musso, Laurent Ponthou, and Éric Seulliet
Published by Village Mondial, Paris, January 2005

The history of R&D in a modern sense goes back to the mid-1800s, when the industrial economy was in its early stages, and the chemical companies, in particular, discovered that well managed research laboratories could produce valuable new knowledge, usually in the form of new products or industrial processes. Solvay, Edison, and Siemens, and were among the pioneers of this era.

Now, with more than 150 years of history, and hundreds of thousands - if not millions - of research scientists and technologists having spent countless days, weeks, and months at work doing R&D around the world, you could say that all of the easy ideas have been done: The easy chemicals have been found, or invented; the easy processes have been developed; the easy inventions have been made. So it seems that science and technology have begun to creep close to the limits of what can be done by people working just in their laboratories.

Furthermore, it’s no longer a question of what we can produce in the laboratory or in the factory, but a question of what will appeal to the customer, who, after all, has now more choice than ever before.

All of which means that innovation is not stopping, it’s just changing. And as competition gets more demanding and more globalized, the need for innovation as a competitive tool for every company is only increasing. So what’s happening? Researchers are still working - and working hard. They’re just working differently. They no longer remain closed up in their labs, because they have found that many of the best ideas come not from the pure scientific process, and not from isolation, but rather from human interaction.

Of course it does matter who they’re interacting with - and the most important point here is that researchers are interacting with people who are different than they are.

Why? Because anyone who has studied creativity knows that many of the best new ideas come when people who have different points of view, different experiences, different backgrounds, or different objectives encounter one another, talk, exchange ideas, work together.

And those who study innovation also know that a large percentage of the best ideas that are developed in any field come from people who are not trained in that field. Outsiders are often innovators because they see differently, because they bring ideas that were developed in one field or one métier to another. So what may be common knowledge for automotive designers, for example, could lead to all kinds of breakthroughs for computer designers - old knowledge becomes suddenly valuable in a new context.

Hence, the method of the new innovation process is not scientists in the laboratory working in isolation, but scientists who have scientific and technical knowledge interacting with those who see the world much differently, because in their interaction come new insights, possibilities,

Of course the ones who may see the world really differently are the customers. So a lot of researchers are spending more time with customers, learning about them, talking to them, imitating them. But to find out what the customers want for the future it is useless to ask them - because they usually don’t know! Instead, you have to watch them do their daily work, or watch them live in their homes, and then talk to them about what they’re doing and what they want to do, and how it might be better. This is an important distinction even if it is a subtle one - the key is to ask what they want to do, not just what they want. The answers will be very different.

And today, one thing that almost everyone wants to do is to have a modern economy that does not destroy the natural environment. We could even say that we have to learn how to do this if we’re going to survive, which means that the fields of innovation, creativity, and R&D have already today a ready and willing market for products and services that enhance sustainability.

The standard of judgment for sustainability is really a simple one - a sustainable product or service is one that, once experienced or consumed, leaves the world a better place rather than a worse place.

Researchers from all kinds of companies are exploring these issues by understanding better how people live, thinking about what customers want to do, and then finding all kinds of interesting and unexpected kinds of knowledge and experiences from many different fields to illuminate the problems and the possibilities.

So this is the new process of innovation. It can be quite rigorous and disciplined even as it also seems wild and crazy compared to the old, boring lab. But it is the future of R&D, without question.