“That’s not gonna work.” The person seated next to me mumbled this my way. It was many years ago, but not the only time, and the many versions of this story share the same look and feel. The presenter is up-front, enthusiastic. Some audience members lean forward for the Q&A. Fortunately, more often than not, the expert seeing a show-stopper rephrases that first impression. Tell us about this obscure point in the physics, or that phenomenon with proteins, optics, or the barrier that has kept the technology stuck in neutral. Then, a creative suggestion. Lastly, what are you doing differently?
Past this gauntlet, having been on the side giving and receiving, eventually, people make decisions. Bets are placed. Public or private, R&D, wild ideas and dreams are funded, with little mystery about why we play the game. We have to. The possibilities can’t be ignored.
The mystery lies elsewhere.
The connection between ground-floor R&D and successful outcomes is poorly understood. The brainstorms carry us away. I’ve focused this way, too, and seen others dive deep, avoiding the distraction of far-off hoops to jump through or realities nearby. On the other side of the table, if you’ve been on enough committees, boards, and teams gathering ideas, you’ve seen plenty of process. Too much. It’s not a process of looking at connections between a portfolio from long ago and big projects today. Rather, it’s about due dates, credentials, and report templates.
There are some meager attempts at gathering up lessons as tales of shortcomings. The titles could be “Adventures of an R&D Hit-man” or “Leadership Secrets of an R&D Hun.” We learn that research dollars yield about as much return as sticking money in the bank – a poorly run bank. No discussion here goes for long without mention of big pharma, where 90% of new drug development fails. There are the new cliches, “fail fast and cheap.” Old enough – whip out an older cliché, “stay hungry.” Older still, say “out of the box.” Like with quantum mechanics, it’s easy to learn just enough to make conversation at a party. When Christenson’s work comes along, and someone says “disruptive technology,” this is the sign the party is over. We can all go home now.
Along too come the simulations, showing R&D to be like throwing darts or buying lottery tickets, except different. The sense we fight battles to win the war lasts until we compare time frames, returns, and everything else. Lipitor appears to have made up for all the losers. But then we must ask if marketing and patents are a plan for innovating.
Mull things over endlessly, and the tiger has us for lunch.
Over too many projects, technologies, upgrades, and people with fantastic know-how, the structure of our R&D investment resists exploration. This is the rooftop of a building with a curious lack of connection to its surroundings.
Here, humility occasionally makes an appearance. We quit believing that we “know how to pick ‘em” like some Wall Street guru who beat the market five years in a row. Nassim Taleb reminds us that randomness will fool us every chance it gets. We always believe we will be the exception, courtesy of our biases and mental shortcuts. Mull things over endlessly, and the tiger has us for lunch. Throw in some quick but erroneous logic, and at least we ran the one time that mattered if also (wastefully) all the others. Add a dash of optimism so we go out and about the next day, none the worse for wear. A short memory comes in handy, too.
Naturally, technology is physical, but methods are abstract. You can touch the gadget, and even specific enough ideas seem clear. Even the most rarefied challenge, say getting to Alpha Centauri sooner rather than later, is tangible compared to pondering how best to invest to get such leaps and bounds.
So why ask why? Why wonder how to innovate how we innovate? Are we those Neanderthals looking at the new hunt plan?
Pay-to-play will appear to make sense if you’ve been in any federal agency long enough doing R&D. Except it may be blindly assuming the same ample resources from better times. Keep calm and carry on. Too often to surprise anymore, the scenario plays out as if forgetting it worked well in the past only because resources were more abundant. It’s no wonder you met some success as you wandered before. You wandered so much. Recently, in a reminder the seven fat cows are followed by thin ones, the budget for NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate got a haircut. Add in inflation and how R&D can easily exceed the inflation rates seen on tables about consumer goods, and it’s far worse.
…as if it’s not enough to dwell on diminished resources and declining returns.
As if fewer resources aren’t bad enough, R&D investment gives in to the temptation to ignore the disclaimer in the prospectus. We expect past returns to be indicative of future performance. Why mess with a good thing? Being odd-man out, it’s not a stretch to ask when the law of diminishing returns rears its ugly head. Any return we got years ago for our seed corn will taper off. It’s not if, it’s when. Repeating how we succeeded before is a guarantee we go no further.
Ramblings about R&D must come to the valley of death – as if it’s not enough to dwell on diminished resources and declining returns. So much research goes well, but suddenly, it’s too expensive for everyone to graduate. This is the infamous “valley of death,” where failing cheaply is no longer allowed. Still young, the technology middle years are carefully curated and managed – fulfilling the prophecy that “really proving it works is expensive.” Predictably, big projects given the go-ahead can’t fill their shopping carts with what were merely dreams twenty-five years ago. They reach for older than that. The shelves for what’s recent yet ready are bare.
I’m told that spreading knowledge is an essential R&D function in the larger scheme of things, a surrogate to address scarcer resources and slower returns. Overcoming denial, partnerships spread knowledge, admitting you must get others laboring when your resources are limited. The commercial shift also avoids the diminishing returns of repetition. As with many partnerships, the NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services, failed and tipsy landers and all, is pushing into this territory. Yet this is more about the valley than the R&D in its earliest stages. Figuring out new ways to do what was done before is not the same as figuring out new things.
The temptation at the end may be to shrug. There will always be voices peddling new metrics, interdisciplinary this or AI that, to address how NASA or anyone performs R&D. Keep at it. Or the contrarian view where “we already have too much process.” No need to worry, as shifts happen organically, arising from the melee. More NASA projects are favoring connecting innovation to projects through partnerships. And challenging projects like the James Webb Space Telescope were once R&D-ish, an immature idea about a very large mirror that folds to fit in your rocket. But these remain a variation on a theme where we hope enough wandering makes some R&D real, one day, in some project.
How do we increasingly connect our NASA R&D to successful projects and programs? Some fads, some sayings, informal notions things are fine, or better years lie ahead, with quips about someone’s secret sauce? Well, that’s not gonna work.
Zapata Talks NASA 