Ian Underwood
Ian Underwood reveals what he wished he'd known when starting up his business.
On May 7th 1959, C.P. Snow delivered the Rede Lecture entitled "The Two Cultures" in Cambridge, England. His thesis was that a there existed a gap (or even a chasm) between two of the distinct cultures of society – those of the sciences and the humanities - a consequence of which was a breakdown in communication.
The end result was a significant barrier to solving the world’s problems. But, this article is not about the solving the world’s problems – only about solving the company’s problems.
By 1997 I was a moderately successful academic in a very good department in a very good university in the UK with little recent experience outside of university research. Two years further on, in 1999, I was the co-founder of a high-tech spin-out company presenting itself as a developer of innovative products based upon new technology.
In the course of securing several rounds of VC funding over several years, the company had considered business plans based on licensing, partnering and stand-alone manufacturing, finally settling (correctly, in my opinion) on the last. The company has come a long way from its conception in the minds of two university researchers.
Through a phase as an organisation focused on development employing primarily PhDs it is today a maturing organisation manufacturing products and employing more than 50 staff in several countries.
Despite my own personal cultural baggage, the one thing I knew in the early days of the company was that the team we had didn’t know it all. If the company was going to what it didn’t have. To focus on a specific example, in the early days we were - like many university technology spin-outs - a company with a large staff of research scientists in which no-one had direct experience of volume manufacturing. And we would need at some point – and the sooner the better – to import some of that manufacturing experience.
Now, scientists are by inclination primarily motivated to, and driven to, understand how and why things work. While this is nearly always beneficial in the long term, it can result in the perception that they are not focused on solving urgent problems with the necessary expediency.
Scientists are necessary to the long-term benefit of the company as they are the developers of new technology and products on which the company’s future revenues will depend. The toolset of the scientist includes techniques such as analytical modelling, computer simulation and designed experimentation.
In contrast, manufacturing staff are by definition motivated and driven to manufacture and ship product. They want to keep things moving. They want to solve problems as quickly as possible.
While this is nearly always beneficial in the short term, it can sometimes result in short term fixes or a combination of sequential fixes that, by stepping back and pondering, have the potential to be improved upon. Manufacturing staff are necessary to the short term benefit of the company as they provide the output on which the company’s revenues depend.
The toolset of manufacturing includes statistical analysis of historical and recent production data and, sometimes, the opportunity to design and run process splits.
In the case of a technology spin-out company the chasm, between the cultures of science and manufacturing, can be amplified as the two cultures are often further separated by historical environment – the incumbent scientists from PhD and post-doctoral research study in universities and the incoming manufacturers from mature industry (such as a CMOS wafer foundry) - and both are struggling to come to terms with the near total lack of infrastructure and support in the start-up environment.
Other possibilities include vertical chasms of culture such as those between "directors and employees" or "management and the shop floor", or horizontal chasms of cultures such as those between "Marketing and Engineering", or my own personal favourite - "Finance and Sales".
In this context, the "thing I wish I’d known" is just how wide the gap between these two cultures can be and just how significant the consequences of any gap can be.
And therefore just how worthwhile and important is the early investment of time and effort into ensuring that the two cultures quickly come to set aside mutual suspicion, appreciate one another’s worth, learn one another’s language, understand one another’s strengths and weaknesses and learn to work effectively together for the common good.
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