Here is what I heard at an entrepreneurship seminar: A successful entrepreneur who is a CEO of a billion dollar revenue company disclosed his way of managing a Ph.D. scientist - starve him in a cage for a week. Then feed him some food, let him out of the cage, and give him a week to finish a project which normally needs a month of time. At the completion of the project, put the scientist back to the cage and restart the cycle. This would bring out the best performance from the talented scientist!
To me this is a perfect example of how to exploit the "talent". This practice might have been going on for a while in sectors such as computer chip design/manufacture, software coding, biological science, and more recently, in biotech and pharmaceutical industries.
A direct consequence of this exploitation led to the migration of top talents away from basic and applied research to I-bank or the like in the last decade. The so-called brain drain in scientific research, in turn, contributed to the innovation shortfall, which is not only real but may also have fueld the current economic crisis. Another culprit of the severe downturn might be the eagerness of Wall Street to commercialize novel technologies prematurely in order to generate quick returns on its investment by bubble up one market sensation after another based on "potentials or promises" rather than hard, concrete proven, reliable experimental/marketing data.
To be successful, a company has to beat the EXPECTATION of Wall Street every quarter or risk facing the music and watching the stock price fall off the cliff. How many breakthroughs can be accomplished in a span of three months? Not even Harry Porter could grow from a magic protégée to an accomplished wizard within a quarter. Why should we force a fledging company or technology to generate results based on stock market's expectation?
To put it in a scientific term, most low-hanging fruits in technology have been discovered and explored. The next breakthrough would probably require enormous money, time, talents, and luck to materialize and be profitable. An investor who picks the winner among startup companies simply based on which one will be the first to break even is no different from a person who throws out the baby with the bathwater. Patience is a virtue! But we all want something as fast as the internet!
When we think about innovation in the last decade, the names popping out are Google, Facebook, Apple, or Nintendo. They define the darling of Wall Street. However, no industrial revolution in human history was based on the success of a single technology sector. If we go after a sustainable economic growth, we need innovative breakthroughs in addition to and on top of those in IT industry. Putting information at your fingertip anywhere and everywhere is nice to have. But how to use this overwhelming information to polish and produce REAL products in other sectors is the real bottleneck we need to tackle on a regular basis.
We have to think outside the box. The old way of running R&D research is outdated in the 21st century. We need to break the traditional barrier and apply the power of cloud computing or the social network to bring out the best among the hardworking scientists. And when we do that, we need to reward those diligent, beautiful minds with compensation commensurate with their contribution and sacrifice. Starving in a cage is not the right way to bring out the best performance from a scientist. It might force him or her to cheat or steal!
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