While the benefits in innovation in such a competitive environment are clear, investment in research is primarily influenced by the strategic behavior of companies, and a deeper understanding of the importance of market share. Patents and publications help to establish corporate reputation, allowing for controlled technology transfer with strategic joint ventures and to raise barriers to prevent competitors from eroding market share.
The relationship between technological processes, innovation and economic growth has changed over time, as innovation and technological advancement became increasingly important for sustained economic performance. This change was largely driven by globalization, with concurrent flows of information, technology, capital and services and resources across the world, and was manifested by the rising investment in market-oriented research, a surge in patenting driven by rapid innovation across all technology fields and a broad investment in the services sectors.
For those who fund the research, the sharing—and therefore efficient use—of data is a high priority. This keeps the “knowledge management” cogs turning, helping organizations to create, acquire, disseminate and leverage knowledge in order to retain competitive advantage. In R&D, this process increasingly requires researchers to externalize and exchange information, to increase the productivity and profitability of the organization. This growing emphasis on knowledge sharing is a significant, step-change in the way research is carried out—and presents new challenges to the R&D ecosystem.
Moving beyond the “paper prison”
Although efficient knowledge management and sharing is seen as key to increasing productivity and profitability of organizations, there are a number of potential barriers that can exist within an organization—primarily created by factors such as hierarchy, motivation, flexibility and transparency of the communication system within the organization.
Many researchers are familiar with the challenges of data storage, given that important research may often be archived in paper notebooks, computers, external hard drives and corporate IT systems. Although document management systems encompass enterprise storage capability for IP compliance, often these fail to capture the tacit knowledge of the researcher—and crucially, the context of how and why the data was created. The introduction of electronic laboratory notebooks has helped to overcome this, by providing an environment that allows the researcher to capture the experimental design process, together with the data and conclusions as the experiment is conducted.
Addressing the human factors
Trust is an important influence on an individual’s reticence to share knowledge. Employees may believe they are in competition with each other, and that the action of sharing knowledge may result in them losing power and influence in the organization. Employees may also not be willing to share information unless they are sure their knowledge is safe from misuse, or that they are certain about the results. Traditionally, such information may have been controlled by visibility and access to the paper notebook where the information was stored. In an electronic laboratory notebook, private areas can be created to hide data from public view, until an experiment has been completed and the results have been validated. Equally, these protected areas may be created to protect sensitive data, or to segment in-house research from that conducted by a contract research organization.
Human capital is an important component of the innovation process, and requires a deeper understanding the soft skills of teamwork and inter-personal relationships. Communication skills and knowledge transfer of employees are thus positively influenced by the level of interaction within the organization (given the opportunity, distance and visibility of the channel of interaction within an organization), but may be equally challenged by a “know-it-all” attitude, poor ability to comprehend the information being exchanged or a fear of receiving negative criticism.
Tackling the infrastructure obstacles
From an organizational perspective, barriers may also exist due to ethnographic language differences—particularly prevalent in global organizations—or where inherent differences in culture exist because of successive mergers and acquisitions. It is said that one of the key challenges to successful mergers of organizations is to reconcile and adopt a new organizational culture, but this may take years for managers to effectively develop and implement successfully.
Organizations can help to overcome this by creating a recognition system to reward employees for sharing information, or by accrediting those whose work contributes to new patents and publications. By enabling information exchange sessions between remote teams, an open culture of knowledge sharing may be established. The organization itself needs to recognize it’s cheaper to re-use information for both successful and failed research, than it is to repeat the work of someone else. In a paper notebook world, it’s almost impossible to identify what has been done by a co-worker in a foreign site. However with text mining of documents, an electronic data repository offers users a facile way to use keywords to search for data that’s analogous to their own research aims.
Technology also forms a key part of the knowledge management infrastructure, along with the employee resource and the processes of data capture. It forms the backbone of intra-organizational knowledge sharing, particularly where multiple research sites exist in different geographic locations. By connecting sites, the research operation become decentralized, although potential technology barriers may result from a lack of integration of the information systems, together with a disconnect between employees’ expectations of the technology and what it’s capable of delivering. Additionally, researchers now often work with a multitude of systems and instruments, and it’s important to recognize not all users have the same degree of capability or access to these. Although some of these barriers can be overcome through education or formal training, users may simply suffer from slow network speeds between sites, which can hinder system adoption and a willingness to search for prior research remotely.
Clearly, the R&D process is evolving. Firms must now manage and share knowledge, and deal with an evolving set of associated challenges in doing so—but these can be overcome. An open corporate culture, coupled with effective data management tools, helps to break the communication barrier by linking researchers across different geographies and business units. This ensures researchers are able collaborate effectively and reuse existing data, to seed new discoveries and keep science moving forwards.
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