XP2021 Experience Report: Five Strategies for the Future of Work: Accelerating Innovation through Tech Transfer

TL;DR

This report presents five tech transfer strategies developed over 25 years at major corporations to enhance innovation by promoting open knowledge sharing and collaboration, reducing R&D duplication, and improving product development processes.

Contribution

It introduces five novel strategies for tech transfer that focus on open knowledge sharing rather than traditional IPR licensing, with broad impact on corporate innovation practices.

Findings

Strategies foster cross-company R&D collaborations

Enhance organizational memory and knowledge sharing

Broaden impact on corporate innovation and talent pipelines

Abstract

This experience report outlines five tech transfer strategies developed over a period of 25 years at four Global 1000 companies (HP, Cisco, Qualcomm, and Nortel) to mitigate R&D challenges associated with duplicated effort, product quality, and time-to-market. The five strategies accelerate innovation through open knowledge sharing, rather than licensing intellectual property rights (IPR) such as patents, trade secrets, and copyrights. The strategies are based on corporate tech forums, conference panels, exploratory workshops, research reviews (at universities and companies), and talent exchanges. While the initial objective was to foster the corporate adoption of software best practices, over time the strategies had broader impact on company innovation, including incubating cross-company R&D collaborations, capturing organizational memory, cultivating and leveraging external research partnerships, and feeding company talent pipelines.