The Unwritten Rules of Managing a Research Lab to Cultivate Innovation

Early in my career, I had the opportunity to work at Xerox PARC as a graduate student intern. I was fortunate to be mentored by John Seely Brown. Now legendary, JSB was at the time director of Xerox PARC. I was working on my dissertation project; I was a worker bee. And yet I observed many lessons about research management. I carried those lessons along as my career advanced over decades.

One rich source of lessons was a tension that arose as corporate Xerox (based in Rochester, N.Y.) wanted to institute Total Quality Management (TQM) and Six-Sigma processes—and the California-based PARC researchers felt culture shock. How researchers felt and why they felt so strongly remains imprinted on my brain. These days, I co-manage an innovative research group that investigates technologies for teaching and learning including AI, and what I learned from my time at PARC and with JSB seem as relevant as ever.

Delivery and Innovation Cultures are Different

In the landscape of organizational management, a distinction exists between teams that (a.) efficiently deliver a high-quality service or product, and (b.) those that innovate and develop their thought leadership in an area of emerging technology. While both require skilled leadership, the philosophies that underpin their success are worlds apart. Managing a service or product organization often hinges on efficiency, predictability, and measurement of outputs. Smooth, repeatable execution matters, and tools like TQM and Six-Sigma can help. In contrast, leading a research team aiming for innovation is an exercise in fostering a compelling vision, strategically seeking approaches that could lead to major advances, and understanding that the most profound breakthroughs operate on their own timeline. This requires an embrace of the unknown and the uncertain—and wide variation is to be explored, not squeezed out.

The Art of Empowering Practice Leaders

Back in the day, I was stunned by one talent JSB exhibited as a mentor: he could remember the “really hard problem” that each of his key practice leaders was working on, the nature of their obstacles, and what might lead to a breakthrough. And he could almost instantly drop back into an intense conversation with any of dozens of leaders and be their thought partner. I was grateful that he treated me and my little problems with similar respect. I found that a short conversation with JSB often left me thinking hard for a week. JSB embodied the idea that managing an innovation culture requires engaging in the ideas of the group.

These days, I think about this as the art of empowering practice leaders. Innovation thrives in team cultures built around the expertise and vision of practice leaders. They recognize the unique demands of their challenge and harness their team’s capabilities to work on it. They craft approaches that explore what’s possible and re-focus effort and resources as they go. Practice leaders foster their team’s intellectual curiosity, are open to where the data takes them, and support ambitious or novel approaches.

The manager’s role is neither to give precise guidelines nor to emphasize conformity and compliance to top-down requirements or metrics. Rather, a manager is a strategic thought partner in the unique challenge that a team is tackling, and helps with resources and overcoming obstacles that get in the way of the team’s work. Yes, research teams also need standardized processes, for example, for developing proposal budgets. Clear and consistent processes in the right places keep the creative team’s attention on their intellectual challenge.

Focal Conversation: Harnessing Strategic Opportunity over Making Your Numbers

When I was an intern at PARC in the TQM days, the cafeteria conversations were about the claustrophobic response that highly innovative researchers had when facing a request for precise metrics for their group’s outputs. It wasn’t only a worry about micromanagement, but also about the need for freedom, flexibility, and respect for uniqueness and distinctiveness in a team pursuing innovation. While a delivery-focused employee finds security and purpose in clear alignment with top-down mandates, a research practice leader chafes under such constraints, viewing them as a hindrance to discovery. 

From the services perspective, it’s obvious that you can’t make things better if you can’t measure them. From the innovation perspective, measurement feels likely to kill the golden goose. A manager who insists on a specific number, type, or quality of deliverables may inadvertently stifle the very creativity they hope to foster, encouraging teams to pursue low-hanging fruit rather than ambitious, field-defining questions. The more effective approach is to focus on the cohesive elements of the innovative practice itself: identifying worthy challenges, nurturing collaboration, ensuring intellectual rigor, and championing the team’s work. When the practice is healthy and vibrant, the groundbreaking outputs will inevitably follow.

And outputs can be measured. Research teams readily internalize that their colleagues count things like publications, presentations, and citations. They know their reputation depends on what they produce. Because they easily internalize these sorts of metrics, an overt focus on driving towards specific quantitative targets is neither necessary nor particularly productive.

Motivation: Intrinsic or Extrinsic?

When I was mentored by JSB and hanging around PARC, I constantly felt the joy of a compelling question, a meaningful quest, and a promising approach. With these ingredients at the heart of every conversation, there was no need for carrots and sticks. Researchers and innovators have amazing intrinsic motivation—indeed, sometimes the best thing is to convince them to take a walk or a weekend off, because “sleeping on it” can beget breakthroughs.

Ever since, I’ve made a study of what motivates researchers and innovators and how to frame organizational objectives in ways that fit like a glove into their aspirational mindset. This focus enabled me and our teams at Digital Promise to be a great convener of research hubs for our field. It’s not that we simply know how to bring people together and throw a good party; we know how to get people strongly engaged in “intellectual fun” with new colleagues at a meeting, and how to cultivate the breakthrough opportunities that can result from new collaborations..

Researchers, by and large, are an introverted group. But they come alive when they can envision a fertile and underexplored opportunity space; when there is low threat to ownership of their ideas, yet strong resonance with colleagues’ complementary insights and skills; and safe space to develop their ideas with respectful yet strong feedback. As a manager, I find top-down imperatives like “write more proposals!” or “crank out more papers!” to be needed on rare occasions, but mostly counterproductive as a focus. Instead,  it’s about nurturing a sense of unique opportunity, streamlining the process of building new relationships and teams, and ensuring processes that give insightful feedback in a respectful tone.

A Manager’s Biggest Challenge?

In closing, I’ll share perhaps the most important lesson I learned from JSB. For many years, California-based Xerox PARC benefited from the inattentiveness of New York-based Xerox Corporation. But it is not always the case that a corporate parent will be inattentive, and it will often be the case that a research or innovation lab is hosted within an organization that has service or product delivery values. I was there at a time when the corporation became more attentive to the lab. In this case, a manager has the super-important responsibility of running interference between the two cultures. Yes, alignment and mutual understandability must be achieved, and yet the freedom, autonomy, and respect for a discovery mindset must be protected. Advocating for cultural independence while achieving necessary corporate alignment can be the most challenging responsibility.

Jeremy Roschelle is executive director of Learning Sciences Research at Digital Promise and a Fellow of the International Society of the Learning Sciences.