The Blind Side: Technology Watch for a resilient innovation project

Suddenly a call: "Houston, we have a problem." We were involved in an ambitious project of technological innovation, and we had some problems. But this was different. The Technology Watch rang the emergency bell.

Years ago, I was involved in another business project, managing a research and technological development project. We were developing new devices to monitor the routes of visitors in shopping centres and supermarkets. The objective was to obtain data (it was not yet called Big Data...) for making various decisions, such as the positioning of products on the supermarket shelves or setting the rental price of the premises in the shopping centres. After the analysis of the State of the Art with one of the local universities, we had chosen as the least bad option the Bluetooth technology for communication between mobile devices.

We had been working for months when the emergency notice arrived: an alternative technology had been marketed integrating everything we needed on a chip, offering more communication capabilities and consuming much less energy, which was key for us. The reflection involved the entire team, not just the project management. The alternatives were clear:

• we would undo a large part of the work, we would suffer budget and calendar problems, and we would get a better product ...
• or we would play deaf, we would save ourselves self-imposed pressure and paperwork, and we would end up with a product that was already obsolete and easily overcome by the competition.

We choose to do things right.

Every research and development project must include a Technology Watch task

Despite having analyzed the existing technology at the beginning of the project, despite all the resources invested, the technology development project would have been doomed if the team had not been attentive to the advances in technology. Because analyzing the State of the Art is not doing Technology Watch. After many months of work, we would have left our closed room exulting to have invented… something now obsolete.

Every research and development project must include a Technology Watch task, in which the team's experts must participate. Whether they are from the leading company in the consortium, the university, the technology centre...

Technology Watch is life insurance for any technological innovation project. Very cheap insurance indeed. That is why the independent evaluators and reviewers of public funding programs consider whether the taxpayer's money is protected with Technology Watch.

If your project is financed with public resources, it is sure that it is constrained by a series of rules that prohibit or hinder changes in the work plan. Before signing, make sure that plan review mechanisms are included and lean on the Technological Watch task that should always be present in your planning.

The Blind Side is a film by director John Lee Hancock released in 2009, which deals with the resilience of a homeless young black man.

Credits: Photo by Alberico Bartoccini on Unsplash

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