The IRI Medalist's Address: Communication of R&D To Management: A Two-Way Street

Abstract

The success of R&D activities is clearly based on communications: communication with senior management, communication within R&D, communication between R&D and company customers, and an area not usually talked about--communication with our manpower suppliers, the universities. To put these arguments in a realistic context, I shall use my Allied-Signal experience as a framework. Allied-Signal is a major diversified company put together during the 1980s by acquisition and selective divestiture. My experience in the company began after the Allied Corporation and Signal Companies merger in 1985. The immediate issue was how to rationalize the corporate-level technical organizations of the two companies. Both companies were decentralized, with most R&D done at the business unit level. After many sessions with consultants and long internal reviews, the Signal Laboratory which had evolved from the UOP Research Center was assigned to the Engineered Materials Sector to serve the chemically-based businesses combined from Allied and Signal. The first order of business was to integrate the Signal Laboratory in Des Plaines, Illinois with the small Sector Laboratory in Morristown, New Jersey. The new Engineered Materials Research Division prospered because it had vital Signal customers like UOP and its chemical and process skill base was very attractive to the Allied businesses in fibers, fluorine products and engineered plastics. The customer-focused, project-oriented research staff was well-received by its new customers, and they rapidly built credibility within the sector with seed funding from the sector and primary funding from business units. However, the focus of the R&D was short-range and project-oriented. Meanwhile, the Corporate Laboratories in Morristown were focused on emerging materials technology and sought to serve the Aerospace and Automotive businesses as well as develop new businesses for Allied-Signal. Given their longer term and new business focus, and the fact that they were funded primarily at the corporate level, this group was somewhat isolated from the company's business units. In 1987, Allied-Signal formed a joint venture between Union Carbide's Molecular Sieve and engineering services businesses and Allied-Signal's UOP. This required dividing the Engineered Materials Laboratory in Des Plaines into a UOP Joint Venture portion and an Allied-Signal segment. At this time, I was asked to assume the additional corporate responsibilities of senior vice president-technology. I now had a Corporate Laboratory and a Sector Laboratory to coordinate. In early 1988, Allied-Signal had also decided to complete its corporate streamlining with a significant reduction in corporate staff. Corporate Technology shared in that reduction. The questions were: what to cut and how to maintain vitality in core technologies. The decision was made to eliminate the in-house development group and to rely on the business units and Sector leadership for commercialization of technology developed in the corporate laboratories. Research activities associated with divested businesses were discontinued. Overhead functions were reduced and certain services were combined with Morristown, New Jersey business units. At the end of this exercise, I was left with a Corporate Laboratory with excellent programs in advanced materials and a state-of-the-art analytical facility. In addition, I had a 50-person chemically-based group in Morristown and the Allied-Signal half of the old UOP Laboratory in Des Plaines. It was obvious to me that the chemical and process skill base of the Engineered Materials groups had significant value to offer to the corporation as a whole. Communication Key To Success Thus, in early 1989, all of these pieces and an applied math and statistics group from the Buffalo Labs of Fluorine Products were merged to form the Allied-Signal Research and Technology organization. …