Excerpts from Book Cover and Introduction
Keynote Description of Book
Research is complex and easily misunderstood. Scientific advance doesn't always precede, it often follows, engineering advance. Answering questions isn't always the goal, finding questions often is. We don't always seek to strengthen conventional wisdom, sometimes we seek to surprise it. What if we could rethink research so that its nurturing, through policy and management, harmonizes with its nature?
From the Introduction
We are particularly concerned about research, the precious front end of R&D and the genesis of technoscientific revolutions that change the way we think and do. While development and research are both vital, research is far more fragile. Research is a deeply human endeavor and must be nurtured to achieve its full potential. As with tending a garden, care must be taken to organize, plant, feed, and weed — and the manner in which this nurturing is done must be aligned with the nature of what is being nurtured. From our vantage point as practitioners of research, however, we have witnessed the emergence of three widespread yet mistaken beliefs about the nature of research — beliefs that are misaligned with its effective nurturing.
Excerpts from Chapters 1 & 2
Chapter 1: The Technoscientific Method
Science and technology are distinct repositories of knowledge with distinct characteristics. The science repository of knowledge consists of facts and their explanations, and the technology repository of knowledge consists of human-desired functions and the forms that fulfill those functions. Of most interest to us is not the static nature of these bodies of knowledge, though, but their dynamic nature — how new science and new technology are created and evolve. That creation and evolution are mediated by mechanisms that comprise what we call the technoscientific method, the interacting combination of parallel and complementary engineering and scientific methods.
Chapter 2: Question & Answer Finding
Human technoscientific knowledge is organized into loose hierarchically modular networks of question-and-answer pairs, and these questions and answers evolve in an intricate dance to create new question-and-answer pairs. Importantly, answers of a scientific nature can lead to questions of an engineering nature. Just as importantly, answers of an engineering nature can lead to questions of a scientific nature: a technological form that fulfills a human-desired function, as it performs that function, can reveal unusual phenomena that become scientific facts ripe for explanation — scientific questions ripe for scientific answers. New questions or answers are not equally easy to find. They are harder to find the further they are from existing answers and questions — from what might be called the "possible."
Excerpts from Chapters 3 & 4
Chapter 3: Surprise & Consolidation
Sometimes conventional wisdom "disbelieves" that potential new knowledge will be useful — but, after further playing out, the knowledge is found indeed to be useful. This is classic creativity, whereby revolutionary ideas that run counter to conventional wisdom are ultimately proved useful. Flying machines heavier than air, evolution by natural selection, quantum mechanical action at a distance, wave-particle duality, the theory of continental drift, efficient blue LEDs fabricated from highly defective semiconductors — all these ideas were initially disbelieved but later proved correct and useful and hence changed the way we think and do. When surprise wins, previous conventional wisdom thought to be true must be deleted or unlearned — reminiscent of the saying sometimes attributed to Mark Twain: "What gets us into trouble isn't what we don't know; it's what we know for sure that just ain't so."
Chapter 4: Nurturing Research
An essential role of research leadership, at all levels but particularly at the lowest levels, is that of gardener: even as researchers extend their interests, which naturally leads to the blooming of hundreds of flowers, research leaders must weed out distractions so the research organization maintains its critical mass, focus, and strategic advantage relative to other competing research organizations. It is better to forgo a line of research than to enter into it without the resources needed to develop critical mass. Research leadership must fertilize the plants and judiciously kill the weeds — otherwise the flowers will die before they go to seed.