Politics and Research Clustering Challenges

So a flashback: United Oceanography got taken over by Oceans International - that's where I joined in. UnOc was on their last legs - a sinking ship, whereas OcInt was stable in a depressed market. How would you move forward in such a situation? Well, how about putting UnOc management in charge of everything? We're suffering from that now. Go figure, the guys with the bad track record aren't doing so well.

Meanwhile my research group is eliminated in the politics around the joining of the two companies. My research cluster incorporates a number of groups like mine around the world, however of them all, I was probably the most participatory and positive of the directors. So there's this delicious irony that my leader faces disbanding the only positive participating contributor to the group, and is left with a bunch of turf-protecting silos to wrangle.

But this is just introductory to my question today - which is, how do you take a multi-national group of research projects and turn them into a constructive, cohesive cluster? I think part of it is in running the cluster more like the OcInt approach, which had been a loose clustering where the group directors really ran their day to day work independent of any cluster leader, and their success was judged by their conversion of research to product-incorporated elements. A new crustacean detector is released using our shell-calcium spectroscopy: that's a success, the company is getting cash from it.

The UnOc approach was more to judge success based on papers published and conferences attended to talk about sell calcium studies. Both groups valued patents, though OcInt ranked patent value. Again, a better approach. Now the UnOc leadership attempts to manage the mixed projects closely isn't really going so well.

Combining both organization's respective research, gives you a bunch of silos with their existing projects. What do you do? Each will protect those projects at all costs. You can cluster the projects together and track their progress like that, singing their praises to anyone who'll listen. But I think the toughest move is probably the one that ultimately will work best. Pretty much tear up the whole thing, getting mixed teams on the projects that are worthwhile, and cancelling the other ones.

I'm glad I'm getting out of the loop on that, as I think the multi-national politics will be a long on-going issue. But without any remaining constructive participators must be a blow to forging ahead. Then again, the fact that I didn't have any long term alignment with either previous organization probably helped. But that's not for me to worry about anymore.

Researchinator sez whew, freedom is good.