The Best Scientists are Becoming Free Agents

Abstract

In professional sports, a free agent is a team player whose contract with a team has expired and/or player is able to sign a contract with another team. Prior to free agency, a player was essentially property of a team. In this article, we examine how smartest scientists in world are behaving more and more as free agents, and effect we believe this is having on industrial research. Smart companies (large and small, domestic and international) are accessing free agents to solve their most difficult and market-driven problems, enabling them to gain significant performance advantages over competitors. To cite one example, a few years ago, senior scientists at Tokyo-based Fujifilm, a leading imaging company, concluded that they needed breakthrough discoveries in facial recognition technologies. This decision was result of shifts in market demands and intense competition from principal rival Kodak, and rising competition from mega-upstarts in imaging like Hewlett-Packard. Breakthrough technologies could impact many divisions within Fujifilm: traditional film, mini-lab processing equipment, CCD digital cameras, digital photo albums, Blue Tooth interfaces, frontier mini-labs, Internet services, printers, and medical instruments. The problem was, despite spending over $1 billion a year on RD Petkevich had been managing partner of Robertson and Stephens investment bankers, and Borrus a lawyer/ adjunct faculty member of University of California at Berkeley--turned venture capitalist. Two years earlier, three had started Geniisis Agents, which we describe as an agency genius--both in representing geniuses in formation of their own new equities and joint ventures, but also, pertinent to Fujifilm, acting as an agent for private sector to find men and women who could solve some of company's pressing and difficult R&D problems. Geniisis belongs to a well-established industry of firms that provide professional, scientific and technical services. What differentiates us, however, is our concentration on being an agency rather than simply a provider of services. Thus, in case of Fujifilm, we tapped into our international network of Geniisis scientific fellows to arrange face-to-face meetings with leading scientists in field of image recognition. Visiting over 20 different universities and private research centers to personally engage these experts, and working in coordination with Fujifilm's technical teams in both U.S. and Japan, we were able to enlist the best and brightest to delineate and sequence key problems Fujifilm needed to solve. Ultimately, we brought together multidisciplinary team of free agents that gave Fujifilm breakthrough in facial recognition it was seeking. This team of genius and innovation it created was previously unavailable by any other means. …