Passing Through the "Terror and Chaos" Phase of R&D Management Change

A number of the attendees at Amsterdam are attempting to lead their organizations through major change. "I am in charge of getting Intellectual Property Licensing going for my company," was the comment of several attendees for companies who have not yet begun licensing their technologies. Another delegate, from a small food company in the American Midwest, mentioned that he had attended the conference to figure out whether and how he should approach technology licensing at all.

Several of the conference speakers acknowledged that leading an R&D organization through such a change in focus is a long, sometimes terrifying process. Jeremy Bentham of Shell stated that moving from an "at cost" to an "at value" department is a hard transition -- "a major change exercise," he called it. He devoted much of his talk to the process he experienced as VP Marketing and Sales at Shell Global Solutions, the contract R&D subsidiary that evolved within Shell to a full-scale business.

Mark Rice, Management Professor of Innovation Practices at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute had commented earlier in the day on the long series of "valleys of death" on the pathway from R&D to commercialization. Bentham of Shell generalized this experience to apply to the long transition from internal-R&D -- only to an R&D business. Today, 25% of Shell Global Solutions´ work is business that comes from outside the Shell borders.

One of the biggest elements of this transition is training R&D staff to distinguish between service delivery and marketing. Bentham noted that this had been hard for the Shell groups. Sometimes they "focused on service delivery when really they should [have focused] on the marketing [of a technology]," said Bentham.

Chuck Dennis, Director of Strategic Intellectual Asset Management at 3M, said during one of the conference breaks that he was growing from a one-person department charged with organizing an intellectual property portfolio across several business units. How can he track all the IP activity going on in those business units? "I can´t," he said. "At this point, I work on cases brought to me. But I´m getting more staff, and we will soon be doing an IP inventory."

Like yet2.com itself, even the firms with the most aggressive licensing programs have not had those programs long. The next two years will see a complete transformation in technology licensing between organizations. Opportunities for casual exchange and discussion such as yet2.com´s Amsterdam conference are vitally important to kick-start this new way of doing business.