Innovations

Spending few years in industry, I'd like to summarize few thought on innovations in engineering and best way to encourage and manage them. Big corporations usually have dedicated R&D departments with annual budgets concentrating on key technologies, and can afford experienced research staff with advanced degrees. On the other side of the extreme, small startups are based on a specific technology, that gives them a potential to find a niche in the market. I assume these companies are lead by one or group of experts, and innovations are their bread and butter because the fate of the company depends on successful commercial acceptance of the technology.

Things can be very different in mid to small size companies, where innovating can vary based on many factors. Let's focus on industrial market, where product life cycles keep shrinking and global competition sharpening.

Probably many engineering departments are faced with a challenge of balancing multiple tasks like customer tech support, production assistance, new product development and adoption of new technologies Those new technologies do enable companies to offer customers not only improved core products but complete solutions. In our company we supposed to spend about 10% of our time for R&D, but most of the time this gets eaten away by "higher priority at a time" tasks like production and customer support. There are many technologies that I see could be evaluated and adopted to improve our products and offer our customers more innovative solutions, but very few of them end up on top of the list during new product development. Many get pushed down by high risk, not having enough technical expertise in the house, project deadlines, or just shortage of engineering resources.

We do have few younger engineers that seem to enjoy engineering and spend some of their spare time developing some projects. I just see a big advantage for a company to motivate those people, and try to shift their focus into technologies, beneficial to the companies business. Once I did approach vice president of engineering with an idea of setting up some kind of reward package for adapting or developing a specific technology that would encourage engineers spending those extra cycles in the right direction. This could be a win-win deal when developer gets acknowledged and rewarded for extra efforts, and the company can obtain intellectual property at a fraction of the cost. Unfortunately the idea got turned down. I would like to hear some opinions and ideas on how innovations are or could be encouraged in other companies with similar dilemmas.

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