Page 197 - HBR's 10 Must Reads 20180 - The Definitive Management Ideas of the Year from Harvard Business Review

PROKESCH

number of companies, including Corning, Genentech, Google, IBM, and No-
vartis, have postdoc positions and sabbatical programs for professors, the
vast majority of researchers even at those firms are long-term employees.
Companies could instead give highly talented people two- to five-year con-
tracts, and perhaps a piece of the action if their work succeeds. They should
insist on team players with the communication skills, patience, and curiosity
to excel in a multidisciplinary context. This approach would give them more
flexibility in attracting the range of talent they might need to tackle complex
problems.

Establish consistency over time in the funding of, organizational approach to,
and independence of advanced research units. This is no easy task; at GE, for
example, R&D funding has yo-yoed from one CEO to the next. Success may
require a board with a deep understanding of the R&D function and the will-
ingness to push back against an emphasis on quarterly profits.

Ensure robust leadership. This means finding and supporting research direc-
tors who are highly respected in their fields and who explicitly see their role
as liberating and nurturing the talent around them. Such leaders will have
strong networks that can be tapped for recruitment and collaborations; a
vision of how the company’s expertise can be applied to create major new
businesses that are in keeping with corporate strategy; the ability to com-
municate that vision to secure internal funding and external support; and
the goal of making the research organization’s value blatantly apparent—
ensuring that the unit is seen as the engine of renewal.

allows companies to pursue unanticipated applications, says Terry
McGuire, a founding partner of Polaris. For example, Momenta, a
company launched in 2001 to exploit new methods for understand-
ing and manipulating the structures of sugar molecules, initially set
out to sequence heparins in order to treat diseases such as cancer
and acute coronary syndrome. However, it realized early on that it
could also use the emerging technology to determine the complex
structures in Lovenox, an existing multibillion-dollar drug. That
work resulted in a biogeneric product for preventing and treating
deep vein thrombosis, which generated more than $1 billion in sales
during its first year.

177