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Just curious if people have had experiences with different approaches/structures to fuel innovation. (especially in consumer electronics-hardware). Two approaches I have seen- 1) Create a team that focuses on research and development with a focus on products/experiences 4-5 years away. Develop concepts to some fidelity and pass on to "production" team. 2) Increase product life cycle to 2-3 years (or have teams that leap frog) and see product through from conception to production. Curious if people have had experiences (positive or negative) with these or maybe other models ?
I've seen both approaches and structures play out in 3 different companies over the last 11 years. Both methods can be effective depending on the scope of the work and the organization dynamics. I'll try to summarize the pros that I saw as well as the cons. For the first structure, research teams are great if small portions of the product are researched and passed into production teams. The pain point of this method is passing the knowledge to production teams and acting on feedback. That is why small scope research works best. If the scope gets large, then the team will get larger and at some point it's better to have the team take the product to production. The other risk is that often the research team has a hard time trying performance to revenue and as a result often the career growth may get stymied for individuals in teams like that. With the second approach, you have more continuity. the only issue is that the product cycle has to be long enough and not as critical. For example the mobile devices industry has a short product cycle with very little margin for missing dates. In such time critical industries the former method works best. Having said that the second method works well for engineers as it gives them a great diversity of experience and allows them to tie their performance to revenue while with the previous you have to look patents issued and other intangibles. The short comings for each method can be mitigated by some policies. For example, in method one engineers can go on rotation between production and research and so on.