The role of scientific conferences in R&D

In this post I'm dealing with a very important question from the perspective of a person managing or financing R&D, how does one know how well is R&D performing? If your thought was that you'll measure it by economic success of a product that uses the results of R&D then you are on a wrong track. Namely, the product can be success or a failure because of a number of reasons, of which R&D is only one. So, another way has to be used, and actually this question is very hard. In this post I'll try to point you to a possible solution along with some of its negative sides. Before continuing, just to reiterate that this post is from the perspective of a person managing or financing R&D.

The best possible solution would be that you absolutely trust all your researchers and that they produce only the best results. But this is idealistic case, namely there are no perfect researchers, and even the best ones could produce mediocre results if they are under sufficiently high pressure. So, some form of quality assurance is necessary.

The next best solution would be for you to check what every researcher did and evaluate it by yourself, after all, whom do you trust more than yourself? But this approach also has problems, and not the small ones:

1. When good researchers does something, the only way to track him would be to do the same things he does, and that means doing his job. 
2. Even if you would know so much to be able to analyze how someone does his or her job, that wouldn't scale.
3. Finally, people tend to hate micromanagement, and this would be micromanagement.

So, this approach also wouldn't work. Another approach would be to assign for each researcher another person that would check his work. But this has almost the same problems as if you are doing everything by yourself. Especially problematic could be potential collusion between researchers, i.e. one praises other's work knowing that his own work will be reviewed, too. So, reviewers might have incentive to praise each other's work.

Thus, it is necessary to have review, but the point of the review is to be independent, done by an expert that knows the topic being reviewed and trying to be as objective as possible. You can pay independent researchers for doing review, but that's not done. What's done instead is sending papers to scientific conferences and journals where they are reviewed before being published. The review process is such that the authors don't know who reviewed their paper (blind review) or even reviewers don't know who's paper they are reviewing (double blind review). Before being published in a journal or on a conference, papers have to pass review process and authors are notified about the decision along with receiving reviewers' comments.

So, there is a way you can receive feedback about the work done by your researchers by sending them to conferences or requiring them to publish in journals. But there are additional benefits as well:

1. Even if your researches have the best intention of producing top class results, it is good to have a feedback. In the reviews there could be suggestions on how to improve the work.
2. By participating on conferences your researchers build their professional network from people doing the same or similar things and that might be very helpful on the long run.
3. You should not forget marketing aspects of scientific publications. Namely, this makes you and your people known as an organization that does research and supports their researchers which might attract new researchers and employees.

Many companies having serious R&D do publish on scientific conferences and in journals and they put on their Web pages lists of published works, here are some:

• Hitachi R&D publications
• Google Research Publications
• Microsoft Research Publications
• Facebook Research Publications
• IBM Research Publications (Haifa Lab)
• HP Enterprise Research Publications
• Sony Research Publications (Paris Laboratory)

There are many others, and I might add more to the list later.

One very important thing before I continue. People tend to think that I say that publications are mean and a goal and thus are opposing to the idea of publishing on a scientific conferences. But that's not true. Publications are only a side-product of a work who's goal is to produce something new that could be used to improve company's products!

But, nothing is perfect and so this approach has some issues you have to be aware of:

1. There are a huge number of conferences in the world many of which are at best average. You should strive to go to the best ones because there you'll receive the best feedback and also meet people that are more likely to be researching things that interest you. Which conferences are those depends on the specific research area and you have to search for them, but as a general rule of thumb the lower acceptance ratio, the better conference.
2. As I've said, the papers are only a side-product of the actual work done. But, if too great emphasize is put on conference/journal publication, then researchers start to optimize that criteria instead of doing a good work.
3. You should be careful what you publish in the papers. The moment its published, effectively it's a public knowledge. This is very good from the society perspective, but it might not be so good from the perspective of a company.
4. Publication on the conference is not so cheap. You have to pay conference fee, travel and accommodation expenses, and maybe few more things. This builds up very quickly.
5. Publication in a journal might cost nothing, but it can take time, up to 18 months. The review process for conferences is several months at most.

But in any case, I think that companies should publish as much as possible on a good conferences or in good journals as it has more benefits than drawbacks.

What is R&D according to OECD

In my previous post I wrote about my personal opinion what is R&D. In this post I'm going to analyze definition given by OECD, which might be argued to be a relevant authority for such topics. OECD produces for decades a document called Frascati Manual which is about collecting and reporting data about R&D. The latest version is from 2015 and that one is used as the basis for this post. The manual, in Chapter 2, describes what R&D is. Basically they say that the properties of R&D activity are (paragraph 2.7):

1. novel,
2. creative,
3. uncertain,
4. systematic, and
5. transferable and/or reproducible.

and activity has to satisfy all those properties to be regarded as R&D activity.

Property of the novelty can be correlated with properties 1 and 2 given in the post with my opinion. The following citations are interesting or important from the manual:

1. In the Business enterprise sector, the potential  novelty of R&D projects has to be assessed by comparison with the existing stock of knowledge in the industry. [paragraph 2.15]
2. The R&D activity within the project must result in findings that are new to the business and not already in use in the industry. [paragraph 2.15]

Those two citations mean that if you do something that anyone already does, or that anyone can do in a relatively short period of time, than it's not a product of R&D activity.

The property of creativity, i.e. the results of activities are based on original, not obvious, concepts and hypotheses can be correlated with property 2 given in the post with my opinion. The following excerpt is interesting:

An R&D project requires the contribution of a researcher!

This means that whoever is doing R&D has to have trained researches  in stuff.

The property of uncertainty, i.e. it is uncertain about the final outcome, has a direct relation to the property 5 in the post. The difference is that OECD publication claims that there are multiple dimensions to this property:

For R&D in general, there is uncertainty about the costs, or time, needed to achieve the expected  results, as well as about whether its objectives can be achieved to any degree at all. [paragraph 2.18].

Furthermore, there is discrimination criteria between R&D and non-R&D activities:

Uncertainty is a key criterion when making a distinction between R&D prototyping (models used to test technical concepts and technologies with a high risk of failure, in terms of applicability) and non-R&D prototyping (preproduction units used to obtain technical or legal certifications). [paragraph 2.18]

So, the more certain you are that there will be some functionality in the final product, less it is R&D activity!

The systematic property of R&D, i.e. to be planned and budgeted, correlates with property 4 I gave in the previous post. This, also includes keeping records, not only planning.

The final property, i.e. to lead to results that could be possibly reproduced (transferable and/or reproducible) is most interesting and I didn't include it in the elaboration of my opinion. Namely, this requires that the results be published somewhere so that conclusions can be independently verified. Somehow, it seems to me that this is the least frequent property. If nothing else, because the scientific output of companies is very small. Someone can claim here that they are publishing somewhere else, why only scientific output? The point is that under the expression scientific output I"m referring on the way the results are published, not where they are published. In other words, scientific publication includes all the necessary information in order for someone else to test the results.

For the end, just let mi note that there is another important subdivision of R&D according to OECD publication (paragraph 2.9):

1. basic research,
2. applied research, and
3. experimental development.

I'll write about those in some future post.

What is R&D and why should SMEs have one?

In this post I would like to describe what is R&D. This is a continuation of a more general idea of cooperation between industry, academia and government about what I wrote in the previous post. By describing what is R&D I hope also to answer the other part of the post's title, why SMEs should have one. In doing so, I'm not going to give formal definitions for now but only my opinion, while definitions I'll leave for another post. Before continuing, I must stress again that I'm not an expert on this subject nor I represent my employer. As such, this is purely my opinion which might be completely wrong. That said, obviously, I don't believe I'm wrong in general though I accept that some ideas might not be well thought out.

I'll start by enumerating several intuitive properties I expect from R&D, looking from the perspective of a company having or wanting to have one:

1. It adds some new value which can be monetized in some way.
2. The new value should not be easy to obtain.
3. It is a midterm process.
4. It is a process that should be done methodologically with clearly defined steps and goals.
5. There is uncertainty as to whether there will be positive results, or any results at all.
6. It is a continuous process.
7. R&D process requires investment.

Note that when we discuss whether something is R&D and whether something produced is a product of R&D then we are not requiring that all properties hold, it is enough for a majority to hold! Now, let me discuss each property in a bit more detail.

First, there is a property that it adds some new value which can be monetized in some way. I think that this one is obvious. Everything company does has a goal of improving profits. Now, maybe more correctly would be to say that everything company does serves it to fulfill its mission. This view of helping fulfill mission actually broadens potential topics that can be covered by R&D since some results that don't necessarily produce money can also be covered by R&D. But, more on to the earth, the company is there to make profits and if it doesn't do that, than it ceases to exist. So, R&D should support this. I will refer to the purpose of directly increasing profits as R&D in a narrower sense, while R&D in a broader sense supports company mission. I could theorize further that R&D in a broader sense is more expensive with less direct ROI and thus more suitable for large enterprises, while R&D in a narrower sense is more suitable for SMEs. Nevertheless, in the following text I'll concentrate only on R&D in a narrower sense unless I explicitly say otherwise.

The next property of R&D is that a new value produced should not be easy to obtain. In other words, if the output of some, supposedly R&D, activity is something that anyone can come up immediately, then it's not the product of R&D activity and probably there is no R&D activity at all. This property is desirable for a simple reason that it helps company keep competitive edge. The more a single company has something that others don't have, the more competitive it is and likely the more successful. But, there is a but. Namely, some outputs of R&D are complex and others are deceptively simple. The advantage of having complex products is intuitively easy to understand by anyone, but the simple ones seek some clarification. Namely, they are indeed simple but the process of generating them isn't simple. You can find examples of such output everywhere. How many times you learned something and your first reaction was: How I did not think of that !? Well, that's because the process to reach it is hard, but the output itself is simple. Now, it is obvious that copying simple stuff is easy and to prevent that patent system was invented.

The third property is somewhat related to the previous one, i.e. R&D is a medium term process. The reason is that short term process is less likely to produce something that fulfills the previous property of not easily replicating results, but other properties are also harder to achieve. In other words, if you invest brief time into development of something, in general you can expect some simple results. On the other hand, having a long-term projects allows one to obtain very good, deep, well thought out results, but in a fast paced world it is entirely possible that the results once obtained, are useless. It also might happen that in the meantime, due to not having any results, company doing R&D fails and vanishes from the market. So, the key is to have a process that is long enough to produce useful results, but not too long for these results to be useless. Finding sweet spot is more of an art than a science.

The fourth property, that the R&D process should be done methodologically with clearly defined steps and goals, basically means that certain steps have to be present. For example, goals or requirements must be defined in order to be able to assess whether the result meets goals set at the beginning or not. Then, there has to be exploratory step of studying existing work, i.e. repeating what already has been done is definitely not something that leads to good R&D, or R&D at all. If nothing else, where is the added value required by one of the previous properties? Even worse, it might happen that the results obtained are worse than what the others achieved, and potentially use. After all, the current state of the art was reached through a lot of investments - in terms of time and money. Not to mention that there is a problem with patents and it doesn't matter if you something copied or invented on your own. If it is patented, you cannot use it without the consent of the patent holder! To continue with steps that should be present in R&D activity, we also have to mention evaluation of proposed solutions. It is mandatory. This can be done by experiments, simulations, etc. The evaluation must be done in a rigorous way so that it is beyond reasonable doubt that proposed solutions do indeed lead to better results. I'll stop here because I intent to write more about this topic in a separate post that deals with an issue of how to establish R&D.

The fifth property is uncertainty as to whether there will be positive results, or results at all. There is a reason why it is called research and development. If it were not so, then it would be engineering. Note that sometimes people mistakenly confuse uncertainty in building a new product that could fail on market with the uncertain results of a research. The two are independent and might interplay in several ways. What we are talking about here is that when doing R&D it might happen that the ideas or goals turn out to be non-feasible. But, this has nothing to do with the fact that if the ideas and goals are feasible, will they be successful on the market or not. Take for example an idea about a system that would allow replacement of programmers. This goal isn't achievable and no R&D activity would be able to produce something like that. But, if it were achievable, it would certainly be huge commercial success. So, care should be taken not to confuse uncertainty of research results with uncertainty of market success.

Finally, the sixth property of continuity of R&D process is something that should be satisfied in order for R&D to be useful. This follows from the ever-changing environment and improving competition. If some company does one-shot R&D this could help the company in a short run, but in the long run there will be no benefit from having R&D.  So, just as company has to continuously adapt to state of the environment, so R&D has to be there to support necessary changes. There is also one additional reason for continuous R&D process. Namely, it is rather expensive to establish R&D process so payoffs are better if R&D is established and allowed to continuously function.

The seventh property I added later, after colleague of mine read the post and commented that the R&D process is expensive. After some thought I decided to rephrase it differently, namely R&D process requires investment. I'm still not certain whether this should be separate property or not because I believe it is implied by combination of previous properties. In the end, I decided to put it as a separate property, just in case. I should clarify this property a bit. Namely, everything is expensive when we talk about activities in the company, but it is outweighed by earnings which are immediate, either direct (e.g. selling a product to a customer) or indirect (e.g. bookkeeping activities). R&D is different in two aspects. First, it requires investment with returns coming only later and in a long run - if there is a result from R&D at all (property 5).

In conclusion, I listed six (seven) properties that can be used to determine if some company is doing R&D or it has something it thinks is R&D. Probably those are not the only properties and if you have any to add (or you think that some of the listed above is not important) please comment and provide your arguments. Anyway, probably not all of the listed properties will be present in many cases of R&D in the companies but as I said in the introduction majority would do. Maybe we can also talk about R&D maturity, i.e. the more properties are present, the more mature process is. But I'll leave this for another post.

Cooperation between industry, academia and government

This is a first in a series of post (I hope) that will deal with research and development in small and medium enterprises. The reason for me being interested in this topic will be clear after I describe a bit how I got into this. And before I start, let me clearly state that I'm not an expert for economy, management, or even a question of what science is. Everything I say is my personal view at the moment I wrote the blog posts and has nothing to do with anyone else. Especially it is not official position of Faculty or University.

I work on the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, University of Zagreb. My firm belief is that no university can be successful in a long run without being part of a prospective environment. The vice versa also holds, i.e. local economy can not be competitive and successful without support of a good university and colleges. To give an example that support this attitude, Stanford wouldn't be what it is without a brilliant leadership by Fred Terman who's vision helped create Silicon Valley. In essence he created successful local environment that helped Stanford, and the circle was closed.

Yes, we live in a global, highly connected world, and any student can work where ever she/he wants, the same goes for me. Furthermore, anyone can come to Croatia and work here, at least in principle. I can also cooperate with anyone I wish in the world. After all, just that is supported by EU through different programs, most notably Horizon 2020 which is encouraging EU companies and universities to cooperate. This is good, and necessary, but it is not so perfect for one simple reason, and that is the question who is paying me, and who is paying for education of students coming to my university? The answer isn't so global, it is actually very local. All that is payed by tax payers in Croatia, and tax payers are individuals and companies living and existing in Croatia!

With all that said, I think it is very important for local economy to grow and I must do as much as I can to help local companies grow and develop for a mutual benefit. And more importantly, I think that anyone in Croatia, working in companies or on universities, has to see things in such a way.

Now, we come to the question on how to help? The answer is actually quite straightforward, I should do what I'm supposed to do on the University, i.e. research. The companies should cooperate and contract universities for research in order to become more efficient, to have better and more competitive products and services. The truth is that not many companies have enough resources for research and development. It is a risky and expensive endeavor. So, the companies should rely on University and on EU funding. Namely, University provides research resources and EU with funding takes a part of the risk. Of all the funding available, I'll concentrate on one specific that supports Smart specialization, for several reasons:

1. I was directly involved in one segment of its preparation.
2. I'm involved in applications for several projects.
3. It tries to connect universities and commercial sector.
4. It isn't meant for large pan-European projects, but projects within a single country. 

Three years ago I was involved in the development of Smart specialization strategy (S3) of Republic of Croatia. This involvement lasted for about two years, a bit less. Smart specialization is actually something defined by European Commission which stated that each country (or region) has to specialize in something in order for the EU to be competitive on a global market in a long term. Of course, specialization has to be supported by the current economy, and obviously, it has to be focused. Now, I'm not aware of what other countries did, nor did I spent to much time searching around, so what I'm going to write is probably specific to Croatia, and even more specific for cyber security (one of the subareas selected for specialization in Croatia is cyber security which, which is where most of my work is done). One of the goals of S3 is to encourage commercial, academic and government sectors to cooperate. This should in turn make commercial sector more competitive.

I'm somehow under the impression that much was talked about S3 while it was developed, but now when the strategy is defined and we have to implement it there are not so much events, if there are any (apart from Ministry of Commerce that actually handles all activities related to S3). For example, I'm not aware of a single round table, workshop, conference or anything else organized by someone concerning S3, how it is progressing, have we learnt something, what can be done better, etc.

In the following posts I want to delve more into the following very important topics:

1. What is R&D and why would SMEs should have one?
2. How to have R&D?
3. How to get ideas on what to R&D?
4. How I think companies behave with respect to S3, and in general towards EU projects.