IBM

When times are good, you can end up working on some of the most exciting and innovative stuff. There are some really brilliant people at Watson Research today.

Research is now much more focused on funding than on innovation. The result is that more and more focus is put on coming up with ways to make the current product portfolio stronger. This is difficult, especially when you consider that the typical Research Staff Member is a Ph.D. with little practical knowledge of how the products are used, and with little to no access to customer feedback. This results in projects that are irrelevant to the product line or are redundant to work being done already by the product staff.

If you are not working on a project like this but something disruptive, you often have to sell it to the people who are being disrupted (called "finding a catcher"). Oftentimes, these people are so vested in the current product that they may spend their efforts killing your work rather than embracing it.

Get back to your roots. Find ways to encourage speculative research. The importance of research is to come up with the next game changers, not to improve the current product line. It's not IBM Advanced Technology; it's IBM Research!