Regional sites:
Specialized sites:
As Chief Innovation and Technology Officer for Gemalto, Tan Teck Lee handles
this same issue by asking his teams to focus on both “current and adjacent
businesses”.
Tan’s group of 1,000 engineers focuses on R&D ideas that will have a direct impact on the business. This means exploring relatively new opportunities in areas such as healthcare or machine-to-machine security, besides those sectors in which Gemalto is already active. Tan handles the challenge of having such a large number of engineers by assembling small working groups to look for new opportunities.
“Any group bigger than 10 stifles the brainstorming and idea generation process,” he says. Engineers are also encouraged to spend 15% of their time away from their regular work to think of new ideas: “We try to give them the opportunity to think out of the box.”
A key element of this is a company program to help the engineers develop. “We always make it clear to them: don’t focus on technology for the sake of technology,” says Tan. “We often see ideas that fail because they’re too far ahead of their time.” Instead, he tells them to “focus on a day-to-day problem to solve, because then you will use good technology and ideas to come up with a novel approach”.
Tan’s focus on business relevance brings out another common issue: all corporate research labs struggle with finding the middle ground between blue-sky research and simply carrying out product development. Nokia’s Shen says:
“It’s important to us, when we have this pull in two different directions, that it creates tension, and that we view that tension as not necessarily bad or something to get rid of, but embrace it. That the tension exists indicates that this lab is doing the right thing.” So Shen’s lab isn’t completely undirected.
“The entire lab is very aware of where the company is headed in terms of overall strategy,” he says. “Beyond that, we allow them to decide what they think would be interesting to work on.” Part of what makes this approach successful, he says, is creating a culture where stopping a project isn’t seen as an embarrassing failure.
And who knows, one day that failure may be rediscovered. As Aravind Joshi, a
professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told pen computing pioneer Jerry
Kaplan in 1979: “Your ideas will go further if you don’t insist on going with
them.”
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At the heart of Gemalto is technological innovation, enabling our customers to differentiate themselves in increasingly competitive markets, and keeping our solutions one step ahead of security threats.
Dec 07, 2010| Gemalto Receives Innovation Award at Sesames 2010 for eGo™
Dec 3, 2010 | Gemalto Wins 2010 Innovation Award at European Nanoelectronics Forum
Jun 28, 2010 | EUREKA Innovation Award: Gemalto R&D Project Wins Coveted Pan-European Trophy
Here are five innovations that fell through the cracks.
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