Collaboration or Competition?
İbrahim Mutlay
Consultant | Innovation & Business Development | Deep-Tech Commercialisation | Digital Strategy | Materials Science | Process Engineering | Sustainable Manufacturing | Marketing | 20 years | Industrial Problem Solving
Tech companies and research groups need collaboration to keep up the progress like CERN does, not competition.
In modern era of science driven innovation, unfortunately we are experiencing how we are not successful at the transforming scientific knowledge to real-life products. This is all true from 80s to today with the examples of superconductivity, advanced composites, discovery of carbon nanomaterials, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, tissue engineering, nanotechnology and green chemistry. Yes, I accept we have been inventing countless numbers of working examples based on those ideas however we have been always limited to partially practical or commercially unfeasible ones. We are replacing metals with lightweight polymers, testing Maglev trains, using AMOLED displays in smartphones however when thinking about potentials I easily can say we are far, far away.
Innovation is a complex process and in this regard I can understand most of the time we will try and we will fail. However, I am also pretty sure we are insisting to do very bad and apparent mistakes. Let's look at the current market and scientific literature; in those micro-projects, lots of tiny teams with tiny manpower and budget try to develop same technology. Occasionally each of them reach something but not "the technology". For example, you can find over 1000 scientific papers that have studied “fullerene based solar cells” meaning that approximately 4000 researchers have worked on this topic and then we achieved what? (Actually this is a question to the reader though!). Or look at the graphene market and how silly we are in managing it.
I always believe in the power of collaboration inspiring from how humankind put men on the Moon, shrink the Ozone Hole or elegantly study Standard Model in CERN. Organizational capabilities and cooperation in CERN is so matured that they recently published a paper with over 5000 authors reporting one of the best measurements on Higgs boson [1]. Well, why we cannot organize such a research to develop for example a graphene based battery to be used in cars? I have personally organized numerous research initiatives and encouraged many scientists and CEOs to working in this manner. Unfortunately (no offense folks), I have witnessed most of them could not embrace that potential sufficiently. I still don’t know why but I know that we must rethink our approach to innovation immediately before doomed to extinction among the mumbo-jumbo of “next killer app-ian” age.
Ibrahim Mutlay
Grafen Co.
Senior Electrical Engineer
8yWell, I would add fair competition. Ibrahim bey is right, CERN is really good example of organizational capabilities for innovation. Good precise questions, in collaborative scientific research, can lead to new discoveries.
Scientist behind Software for Mod, Sim and Vis using Converged HPC / AI
8yIt need not be either / or. Coopetition can be a successful strategy in scientific innovation "games". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coopetition
Expert in Colloid and Interface Science
8yDear Ibrahim, agree, cooperation moves us forward. In my experience, however, it is often hindered by funding, 'lack of time', ... I am in favour of small steps, especially because I have only 'short legs'. By the way for large scale cooperation serious organisation and structure is mandatory.
Author. Growth Strategy, Strategy Implementation for mid-size Corporates and Entrepreneurs, Venture Capital.
8yCollaborating on Innovation or "Open Innovation" is something that both P&G (particularly) and Unilever have done reasonably well. P&G started early in the last decade, and more than 50% of innovation now comes from open innovation, as per reports. We have not been fair to two technologies: Stem-cell & Nano. Both were hyped early last decade when they were not ready. The lack of breakthrough technologies getting commercialized last decade neatly coincides with the impact of the end of the cold war in the preceding decade. Unfortunately, military applications drive many breakthroughs.