The topic
dominating discussions in boardrooms around the world is growth. CEOs
agree that growth through new products and services is their number
one strategic objective. A company’s innovation capabilities
will determine its future growth potential. Winners in the
highly competitive arena of global markets will be companies that
base their new products on emerging technologies that come from
nanotechnology research. However, companies are struggling to
assimilate the new knowledge, create new product ideas, and create a
business case for developing these innovations. The National
Partnership for Managing Upstream Innovation investigates these
issues and is addressing the challenges.
The
National Partnership for Managing Upstream Innovation consists of a
team enabled by a grant from the Partnerships for Innovation program
at the National Science Foundation (NSF). The primary
participants are North Carolina State University’s (NCSU) College
of Management and its Center for Innovation Management Studies
(CIMS), and the 225 industrial companies of the Industrial Research
Institute (IRI). The team worked with the IRI to identify
problems and issues that industrial innovation managers were having
as they tried to cope with the infusion of federal funding into
nanotechnology research at university and government labs. This
investigation showed that communications between industrial and
university researchers lacked structure at the basic research end of
the continuum and that existing research and development planning
practices, such as “technology road-mapping” were inadequate. In
response to this need, NCSU researchers (with support from an NSF
grant) adapted and redesigned a “tool” that was originally
developed to support innovation planning at stages of technology
development that are more advanced than is generally the case with
nanotechnology.
The
team contacted a number of NSF-funded nanotechnology centers,
explained the new tool, and arranged to demonstrate it to industrial
and academic teams at several centers. After an alpha test at
Pennsylvania State University to debug the tool, and experimental
testing at Purdue and Northeastern Universities, the preliminary
results -- in the form of opinions expressed by both industry and
industrial participants -- indicated that the tool promotes increased
mutual understanding about research priorities, and can be expected
to increase research productivity at the industry-university research
interface. To augment this opinion data, changes in management
practices and communication behaviors in these centers over time are
being documented.
The
National Partnership for Managing Upstream Innovation team is
disseminating these results to practitioners by incorporating them
into courses offered through the Innovation Management School, an
executive education program offered by North Carolina State
University and the Industrial Research Institute. Specifically,
a prototype course has been run at Meadwestvaco (a major packaging
company) on the creation of business opportunities from emerging
technology. Research findings are being presented in academic
journals and symposia focused on innovation management.
Partner:
Industrial Research Institute
