Shared Secrets – Entry #16: We Should Have Brought The Interns

This is the fifteenth in the series on managing collaborative innovation. Click here for the Beginning of the Series

A summit was held recently between the senior research managers of a semiconductor firm and a biotech company to see if there were opportunities to collaborate.  After a day of canned powerpoint presentations and vague discussions about already well-publicized research projects, there was a brainstorming session that went something like this:

“We’re looking into nanotechnology.  Are you doing anything in that?”

“No, we aren’t working on nanotechnology, but we have a project on the role of cytokines in oncology.  Do you have anything in that?”

Seeing that the two groups were unwilling to engage each other beyond reciting general topics of interest, one frustrated attendee turned to a colleague and said, “We brought the wrong people.  We should have sent the interns.”

His point is a good one.  The mid-level research managers and executives had a lot of things working against them when it came to sharing intent.  If a senior executive indicated a direction, it would have been taken by the other company as a signal of an imminent market play.  If instead the companies had trained junior employees in common standards for sharing intent, they could have had a much more open dialogue; emerging intentions articulated by an intern are less likely to be taken as a signal of an imminent market play.

Sophisticated organizations team-up low-level employees with senior executives whenever summits with outside firms are called.  This was a notable feature of collaborative work on Java even after it matured into a strategic platform with executive support.

Click here for the Previous Entry.

[Click here for entry #17.]

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