Missed opportunities

Juels goes on to raise a point that many experts in innovation agree on: the processes by which grants are awarded and papers are accepted for technical journals tend to filter out ‘outliers’ – those ideas that deviate from the norm.

“That can be good – many crankish papers are submitted to journals and conferences – but it can also be bad, in that there are many missed opportunities,” he says. “There are endless stories about brilliant papers being rejected multiple times before they finally appeared.”

Like Shen, Juels takes a bottom-up approach: “The researchers in the lab are self-motivated, driven and creative. I don’t have to tell them what to do, but I am responsible for exerting an overall shape on the research program and promoting it to the rest of the company.”

For him, the keys to fostering creativity are treating the scientists in the lab as colleagues rather than as staff, giving them a fair degree of autonomy and picking the right personalities.

“Many research scientists are concerned primarily about status in the academic community, and that desire can often be at odds with the skills, temperament and investment of time it can take to transfer technology to the company.”
 

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