There is a class of people in the world who are gifted with creativity, vast powers to imagine and invent, and also a thirst for understanding the deep intricacies of a topic. Where should these people work?
For some a role as an
“Being an IBM fellow, I had the freedom to do anything. But the real satisfaction is not the work itself, but the difference that it makes in the life of a customer,” said Jhingran, who will deliver the keynote speech at Apigee’s I Love APIs conference today. “I wanted to shorten the process of making a difference, make it almost instantaneous. A startup, and in particular a startup that delivers software in the cloud, was an ideal environment for me. That coupled with the fact that I would learn about APIs, and teach Apigee folks about data -- what could be better?”
There are other roles that are like this that work differently. You can work as a consultant. You can be an expert in residence at a venture capital firm. And of course, you can do your own startup. All of these have rewards and drawbacks. As a consultant you don’t own the work as much as many would like. The expert role at a VC is essentially a holding pen on the way to a startup. The rewards of a startup are many, but in essence you have to get married to the idea and live with it for a long time. Many people are serial monogamists or polyamorous when it comes to exploring good ideas. They want to deeply commit, but not for too long.
Hilary Mason, fresh off a year as data scientist in residence at Accel Partners and three years and half years before that as chief scientist at Bit.ly, didn’t like any of these options. She felt there must be a way to use her talents and those of the three other founders to be able to learn, imagine, invent, and create in a way that provided substantial value. (Mason is speaking today in Seattle on “The Data Opportunity” at Tableau Software’s annual conference.)
Fast Forward Labs: A New Model for Knowledge Transfer
To meet their need for a satisfying job and to fill what they saw as a gaping hole in the process of commercializing important science, Mason and her co-founders created Fast Forward Labs.
Fast Forward Labs aims to provide a steady stream of actionable ideas to early adopters who are looking for a technology-based advantage. Here’s how it works:
- The Fast Forward
Team looks for techniques and methods that are taking shape in the academic community that will likely have commercial potential. - The Fast Forward Team then chooses those domains that are ripe for adoption in the world of both large enterprises and in startups.
- The Fast Forward Team then does a deep dive, reading everything in sight, from textbooks to academic papers, talking to the leading lights in the field, and also to those already at work on commercializing the technology. The result of this is the first part of Fast Forward Labs product, a research report that gets you smart on a topic, not in a superficial way, but in a way that allows you to map the capabilities of a technology to your problems.
- Because Mason and her co-founders believe that a full understanding of a technology cannot be achieved without making something, the second part of the offering is a prototype that puts the technology to work.
Fast Forward Labs offers this service as a subscription, a model used by many other research organizations. Mason said that in the first year, three or four research reports will come out.
Fast Forward Labs also offers consulting services to help companies put the new technology to work. Mason said the idea was that Fast Forward Labs would be focused on strategic advising for identifying opportunities and solving difficult problems more than implementation.
Not Your Mom’s Research Offering
A closer look at the differences between Fast Forward Lab’s model and much of the research out there makes it clear that the target client are early adopters who are seeking to find an advantage.
Research firms like Forrester and
Consulting firms like Lumen Data or Opera Solutions often do introduce companies to new technologies, but usually these companies are specialists in one area and provide the technology by offering a platform and services. Lumen Data, for example, specializes in data management and analytics. They have a platform for predictive analytics that can be applied in conjunction with their services. Opera Solutions is another firm that has a broad platform for finding signals in data. They too adapt the platform to the business needs of a client through services. There are hundreds of companies like these that specialize in various areas.
Of course, independent lone wolves can present new ideas, but rarely in as complete a form as Fast Forward Labs, and almost never with a working prototype.
The key to Fast Forward Labs success is finding early adopters who have the following characteristics:
- A mission to extend products and services with emerging technology that is not well established.
- A budget for experimentation and a process for getting larger budgets for development.
- Confidence and expertise to build rather than buy.
- An appetite for risk based on a desire to build a durable competitive advantage.
The closest thing I can recall to what Fast Forward Labs is doing is the role that Nathan Myrhvold played as CTO of Microsoft in the early days. During that time, Myrhvold would write deep analyses of printer technology or emerging technology such as the Internet. His role seemed to be to make sure that Microsoft was aware of anything relevant and was thinking about how to adopt before the market. I’m sure that
The challenge facing Fast Forward Labs is to find those companies who want to rent a Myrhvold rather than buy one.
If Mason and her team succeed, they will not only accelerate adoption of new technology, but will also have found a new way for nerdy creative people to make a satisfying living.
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Dan Woods is CTO and editor of CITO Research, a publication where early adopters find technology that matters. For more stories like this one visit www.CITOResearch.com. Dan has performed research for Apigee and Tableau and other companies in the API and analytics space.
