Effective human resource planning is the key toachieving innovation in technical organizations. Thisincludes analyzing and determining staffing needs,
recruiting, selecting, and hiring qualified people to dogood R&D.
Effective Staffing Practices
There are six different stages of a technical innovationproject: pre-project, project possibilities, project initiation,project execution, project outcome evaluation, and
project transfer (7). Research shows, further, that fivedifferent work roles are critical to the innovation process (1,2). These are:
• Idea Generating: Coming up with ideas for a new or
improved product, process, or service, a new technical
procedure, or a solution to a challenging technical
problem (3).
• Entrepreneuring or Championing:
Recognizing, proposing, or pushing a new technical idea, approach, or procedure to formal management approval (4).
• Project Leading:
Providing leadership and motivation necessary for mobilizing scarce resources to undertake a technical program or a project (5).
• Gatekeeping: Collecting and disseminating information on latest developments inside and outside the organization as they relate to science and technology, marketing, or manufacturing (6).
• Sponsoring or Coaching: Providing guidance andsupport to less experienced personnel in their critical roles.
Four observations need to be made bere:
1) These critical functions call for different personal characteristics, knowledge, and skill competencies. An appropriate mix, therefore, must be maintained in staffing and building a “talent bank” of scientists and engineers;
2) The five critical roles identified above need, quite frequently, to be fulfilled by more than one person on a project team in order for the project to be successful (7);
3) Some individuals occasionally fulfill more than one critical fijnction;
4) The role a scientist or engineer plays changes over his or her career with an organization.
Effective staffing in technical organizations thus requires identifying different staffing categories anddetermining the proper mix required in each.
Creative Engineers and Scientists.—At one level, a clear distinction should be drawn between creative and less creative people (7). The breadth of the continuum in
creative ability appears to cover several orders of magnitude. In practical terms, it is reasonable to designate as “creative” that upper percentile of the continuum from which will come most of the creative ideas developed in the organization (8). The remainder of
the technical staff can be designated as “assistants.”
Note
that both groups are equally necessary for an R&D organization;
the former is simply more creative than the latter. The distinction between “initiators” and “problem solvers” is significant for staffing purposes (8). The initiators are the individuals who, in Norman Hilberry’s words, “have that additional
mental ability that enables them to recognize previously unrealized problems and to evaluate their importance. . . . It is one thing to have an idea about some specific problem; it is quite another to have an idea about what it is that is worth having ideas about” (P). In contrast, the problem solvers must be shown the significant problems.
It follows, therefore, that initiators are the leaders—the individuals whose judgment the technical organization wants in charting its future course. The problem solvers,
though perhaps equally ingenious once into the problem, must be directed.
There are two types of initiators: “discoverers” and “inventors.” Discoverers see a phenomenon or a problem in terms of the question “Why?” They are basically interested in understanding a phenomenon rather than in trying to use that phenomenon to some advantage. Inventors, on the other hand, are concemed more with the question of “how” things work, and how they can be made to work better. It follows from this analysis that scientists and engineers can, for staffing purposes, be placed in six categories: more assistants than creative people; more problem solvers than initiators; and more inventors than discoverers. This last group is rare indeed! (7, 8).
The key point of this discussion is that some technical specialists will be primary to the needs of the organization, and others peripheral. Unfortunately, many technical organizations do not differentiate between the six staff categories and, thus, end up hiring the wrong people.
Product Champion.
—Evidence suggests there is a high degree of difficulty in matching the definition of
champions found in the literature with practical realities (10). In general, the product champion portrayed by previous research is not particularly congruent with
reality. Thus, a meeting of R&D directors at the University of North Carolina, was not able to reach consensus about the existence of, characteristics of, or management role of an “executive champion” as suggested by Roberts (11) and Maidique (12).
Product champions appear to have several personal traits including (13): technical competence; knowledge about the company; knowledge about the market; drive and aggressiveness; political astuteness. While participants in the North Carolina conference generally accepted this list as a good summary of traits generally associated with product champions, they differed from the literature in tying the emergence of championing activities more to imperfections in organization and management than to the inherent predispositions of individuals.
It is interesting to note that these imperfections include irrationalities in project selection processes and articulation of R&D objectives, difficulties in moving projects from laboratories to the operating divisions, uncertainties as to what top management actually wants, imperfect knowledge of the market, and a general management tendency to favor the status quo. The primary theme stressed by conference participants was that product champions usually arise around the imperfections in the organization in which they work. In a perfect organization, there would be no need for champions! Champions act in ways that might be considered irrational to others, but not to the champion. Effective champions actually reduce the risks they face by acting on probabilities and presenting their arguments incrementally, but tenaciously, so as to reduce the perceptions of others that what they are doing is in any way unusual or risky. Successful champions are seen as both insightful and diplomatic, and skilled at organizational politics. Research tells us (14):
• Product champions are not made—they are born out of existing corporate situations.
• In order for the championing to be effective, management must create an environment that supports championing (i.e., reward systems, providing visibility, reducing risk of failure, etc.)
• Championing should in no way be considered a fomial role; it remains outside the process of management.
• It is futile to attempt to identify product champions in
the recruiting process. In addition to the absence of distinguishing characteristics at this age, there is evidence that the attributes of a successful product champion closely match the description of the effective general manager developed by Kotter (75).
• A number of product champions have failed badly after an initial success. Hence, failure was much more expensive than it might othenvise have been.
• Product champions don’t necessarily make good project managers. While the product champion’s role is informal, the project manager’s role is a formal one.
They should, therefore, work together and complement each other.
Entrepreneurs.
—Entrepreneurs are basically out for themselves. They are driven by a faith in themselves and their idea, and they will not be deterred by tbe logic of corporate planners or the edicts of their own management. The entrepreneur or product champion is an aggressive advocate. This person is persistent and will take every opportunity to advance his idea, going, if necessary, outside normal channels. The entrepreneur’s interests go beyond the technical work into the marketing and business-related aspects. The really top-notch entrepreneurs will probably leave the company in which they reside and start their own businesses. Those not comfortable in doing so may serve the host corporation very well if their ideas are good. They can also spend a lot of the company’s money chasing a failure. Unfortunately, one does not know which is which until it is all over.
Research
• Technology Management
Six conditions were found to be correlated with entrepreneurship and the success of new product development efforts (16):
• Early identification of potential entrepreneurs.
• The entrepreneur’s formal license.
• Informal influence of the entrepreneur.
• Sponsorship provided for the entrepreneur.
• Organizational location of the entrepreneur’s project.
• Discretionary power given to the entrepreneur.
Absence of these six conditions was strongly correlated with project failure.
Intrapreneurs.
—Both entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs are pushed primarily by the desire to accomplish
something (17). But for intrapreneurs, the real payoff is the feeling of success—”I did it, and it worked.” (75). Failure should be regarded as a leaming experience and firms must permit it. There is no success without risk.
Taking no risk is the surest way to fail. This, presumably, was the basis for 3M’s motto: “Be sure to generate a reasonable number of mistakes.” While large companies are good at coming up with sound ideas, they are often poor at carrying them out because of a morass of analysis, approvals and politics.
Although Peter Drucker has called “intrapreneurship” a new name for an old idea (19), the relatively wide adoption of this concept by large corporations is, nonetheless, a recent phenomenon. Intrapreneurial arrangements have been adopted by a large number of companies, including AT&T, Data General, Du Pont, Ethyl, General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, 3M and Texas Instruments (20).
The new style involves a radical departure from Corporate policies based on control from the top, layers of reporting and analysis, and an intolerance of failure. As a result, intrapreneurship seems to work best in companies like 3M that have a long tradition of encouraging employees to be independent and innovative.
Gatekeepers.
—As integrators of information who serve
as a “bridge” between the organization and the outside, gatekeepers perform a necessary and important function.
Ideally, an organization needs at least one gatekeeper in each of its primary disciplines.
Frohman identifies two types (21). One is the “information gatekeeper”—the individual whose contacts are mainly with the technical professional and whose sources are technical joumals and colleagues. The other is the “technical marketeer” whose contacts are mainly with consumers, suppliers and the literature, and who thereby acquires a feel for what innovations will and will not be successful and for what the marketplace currently seeks.
The role of project teams and the impact of gatekeepers in several electronics and chemical organizations have been explored by Allen, Katz and Tushman. Among their preliminary findings (22):
• Engineering development groups that are managed by gatekeepers or that have regular access to them are perceived by upper-level management as performing better than groups that don’t. It is just the opposite with applied research groups.
• There is a negative correlation between technical performance and communication with the outside world for development teams that lack gatekeepers or means of access. On the other hand, teams that do have access to a gatekeeper show a strong positive correlation between the extent of extemal communications and technical performance.
The study findings, according to tbe researchers, have a number of implications for management. These include:
• In terms of gatekeeping, development groups and research groups must be managed very differently. The former needs a person who fills this role, while members
of research groups ought to be their own gatekeepers, and management should remove any barriers to this (e.g., tight travel budgets).
• Gatekeepers play a vital role, not only by communicating themselves but by helping others communicate more effectively.
• Young engineers should work for or in close proximity
to gatekeepers.
• Management should be careful not to overmanage the function. Gatekeeping works because it is nurtured. If you try to dictate the gatekeeper phenomenon by
appointing people rather than letting them move into the role gradually (and also move out of it as they rise in the organization), then you’re likely to stifle rather than
encourage gatekeeping. Clearly, the R&D organization, to be effective, needs a
mix of staff witb a variety of skills and backgrounds. The R&D organization also needs a mix in the dimensions of staff experience. The organization would not succeed if all the staff were within a few years of graduation, nor would it succeed if all were 20 years away from their alma mater. Both groups are needed.
N. Thongpapanl and Jonathan D. Linton 2004
September 3rd, 2008 by 
harrywidyantoro 
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