Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | R | Research Technology Management

In innovation, is patience a virtue? Patience and impatience are partners in innovation if applied in the right mix and at the right targets.

Article Excerpt
Do scientists--those funding research--or research managers need to control their emotions for the best outcomes? Most texts and articles on innovation treat strategy setting, fact-based assessments at milestones, best management practices, and getting maximum returns on investment as rational endeavors, with occasional bows to intuition or passion. The emotional side of innovation is often ignored (1).

I had not thought about the role that certain emotions could play in the innovation process until I was preparing a talk for a group of R&D managers and asked myself: "Is patience a virtue in innovation?" Maybe today anger, fear, passion, and impatience are called for as global competitive pressures continue to climb.

To answer this question I started on a journey that took me to a number of experts who were active in the Industrial Research Institute, others who worked with the IRI's Research on Research Committee working groups, and still others who had studied research projects in DuPont.

I did remember some advice that has been passed down in DuPont over some 60 years. In 1950, Crawford Greenewalt, an engineering graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, researcher, ornithologist, member of the Manhattan Project, and later head of the DuPont Company spelled out four principles regarding R&D management (2):

1. Provide a broad commercial base--leverage research across diverse business lines.

2. Pick your problems with great care and judgment.

3. Be patient. Don't evaluate results after one year, but wait as long as five or six.

4. Know when to quit a problem (done largely by intuition, but we prefer to call it intelligence).

Patience and persistence or impatience and a sense of urgency? Which is needed today?

Do R&D managers need to be impatient when researchers lack a sense of urgency, when poor techniques are evident, when milestones are not reached, or when adequate preparation is missing?

Do R&D managers and business leaders need to be patient, recognizing that achieving the desired result often takes longer than we had optimistically forecasted, that several solutions to a problem need to be explored to get the best one, and that all the pieces of the puzzle need to be found?

When I asked experts these questions, I heard that:

* Success comes from patience.

* Success comes from impatience.

* Failure comes from impatience cutting off funding prematurely or under-funding a project.

* Failure comes from too much patience missing the market opportunities.

And maybe there is an art in combining the two.

Patience--the Unfair Advantage

To begin exploring these questions, I went to some recent literature and then online for advice from John Nesheim, entrepreneurship teacher at Cornell University, author of High Tech Start Up, and coach to CEOs of start-ups. He advised me that patience is a virtue of winning entrepreneurs. He put it this way(3):

I am back from a couple of weeks of vacation fly fishing for trout in California's mountains. During my days in the beauty of God's creation I reflected on how similar fishing is to being an entrepreneur. The first virtue is patience. It takes nerves for an aggressive, eager, fast-moving entrepreneur to go slow, take more time, to be patient. But it has its reward and is worth doing often. Patience gives time for contemplation and challenges to your idea. E.C. called me today with afresh update to his" business model. By now it is radically different than his initial idea. And it is getting very powerful. As part of the new wave it could be a gorilla. Had he rushed to venture capital with the first idea he would have missed the fresh one.

Fishing is like that. I arrive at a spot where the river is flowing among rocks and trees. I study it torrid the spots where the fish will be resting while watching the current bring food to them. Most often my first selection of the spot to start fishing is changed after patiently examining alternatives. And I usually find a fish or two in the spot I cast my fly to after all the decision-making. The reward is fulfilling.

BOTTOM LINE: Try patience to...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!