Prologue:
After my undergrad
study in Ankara, I moved to Munich for my Ph.D., to live in abroad at the age
of 23. During the five and half years that I spent there, I believed I learnt a
lot both in terms of science and life experience. I then moved to the Bay Area
to do my postdoctoral study at Genentech, where I was deeply impressed by the
quality of science and life. Throughout my articles, I’ll give examples of famous
tech and research companies/institutions from the Bay Area including Apple,
Google, Facebook, Stanford, Genentech and Tesla Motors because of two reasons:
1) I am simply more familiar with them because I lived there J
2) they are mostly worldwide known institutions and it is easy to grasp how
they change our life. The advantage of living there is also being ahead of the
wave. For example, it is not very unusual to see a driverless car with the
label “Google self-driving car” on Highway 101 in San Francisco next to your
car. Overall, my point is also not a praise of the US over Turkey and Germany
but just an emphasis on their strength in developing cutting-edge science and
technology. In some future articles, I would like to write about why Turkey and
Germany are also great countries to live. I believe that both Germany and
Turkey have the potential to create a Bay Area environment to generate their
own breakthroughs if they would break certain norms.
Advances in science and technology unavoidably change our
life in many aspects. From young to old, we benefit from the developments that facilitate
our daily activities and help us to fight diseases. Many diseases now can be
treated, and people with chronic conditions have gained better life conditions.
While the societies who conduct cutting-edge research are at the peak of the
wave to find solutions to problems, the followers/imitators would mostly try to
adopt pioneers’ inventions to seek their own solutions. Naturally, not every
advance of leading societies will be a proper answer for the others. They even
may create more problems if not well adopted. Hence, it is highly desirable
that followers/imitators would develop their own innovations. In addition, if
we don’t want to be concerned about others spying on our government officials,
and personal life -which will naturally happen as long as we all use Gmail, iPhones
J- we better develop and
use our own solutions. But how can we create a society that could come up with its
own breakthroughs?
I believe that this requires an environment that encourages
liberal thinking, which can welcome challenging –out of the box– ideas even if
they seem out of the standardized life norms. While one can build a city like
Dubai by pouring money into any society, a similar approach would not be
sufficient to create a Harvard University or a Google in any society. The latter
requires infrastructure, culture and complete freedom of individuals to come up
with innovative ideas again and again as quick as possible. Even Germany, which
is one of the most developed countries, lags behind the US system in that
regard due to a somewhat conservative system and thinking. For example, Germans
are famous to make high quality products: if something has "made in
Germany" label, we know that it is strong, stable and long lasting. Even
if it is more expensive, we would invest on high quality German products
considering the future. However, to develop treatments for devastating diseases
and develop our own technological advances rather being solely users of others'
technologies requires more radical thinking and quicker accomplishments. For
example, if iPhones were to be made in Germany, most of them would not come to
market that quickly because they would fail quality tests of German standards
due to e.g. their antenna problems, software problems etc. When they come to the
market though, they would work perfectly. However, in that case, now we would
most probably be using iPhone 2 rather than iPhone 5. Development of the best
electrical cars (Tesla), Internet search engine (Google), online social
networks (Facebook, G+) are similarly products of environment having complete
freedom of individual to come up with leading-edge ideas to change the world
without authoritarian restrictions. It is noteworthy to mention that most of
these companies were founded within the last 10-15 years, by young individuals
at their early 20ies or 30ies, unlike established, well-trusted big-brother
companies/governments, who most of the time would dislike and try to suppress
such young and creative initiations in the conservative societies.
One great example of such an innovative company is Tesla
Motors. It was founded by visionary entrepreneur Elon Musk, 11
years ago, when he was 31! Today, Tesla Motors produces the best electrical car
(Model S) in the world
(ahead of established companies like Toyota and BMW). If someone were to come
up with the idea of making such an electrical car company in another country, in
addition to lack of innovative environment, they would mostly liked be suppressed
by rich and powerful establishments and vanished in a short time. Not to
mention, SpaceX, the other company founded by Musk is has another hard to
perceive vision: travelling common people to space. It is interesting that Elon
Musk studied Art and Science, which might be a critical component of his
visionary personality, who thinks of and produces novel ideas again and again.
I would strongly suggest to you at least to have a look at his
TED talk. Maybe the most famous CEO of the last decades, Steve Jobs had similar
visions to come up with novel and inspiring ideas and products, which
significantly changed our lives. Steve Jobs was also very curious about art and
had been always fascinated by design. His rebellious nature to challenge
authoritarian systems (norms) was evident even before funding Apple. For
example, he and his buddy and co-founder of Apple, Steve Wozniak, developed and
marketed "Blue Box" which could hack into large phone company in the
US to make free international calls instead of paying fortunes. When they started
producing the Apple 1, one of the main aims was to challenge the concept that
the computers, which were very expensive at that time, were only for rich
people, companies and banks.
Being first in developing novel science and technology is also
very important from an economical standpoint. Tesla Motors market value reached
to ~$ 36 billion within 12 years! WhatsApp, which was founded in 2009 by two
former Yahoo employees (Brian Acton (41) and Jan Koum (38)), was recently sold
to Facebook for $ 19 billion, an amount that is larger than major investments
of countries often are. For example, the cost of the much discussed 3rd bridge
in Istanbul is ~$ 6 billion and the Eurosia tunel is ~$ 1.3 billion. The amazing
football stadium of Bayern Munich, the Allianz Arena, cost ~$ 0.34 billion. The
research budget of the entire European Union in the framework of Horizon 2020
is about ~$ 15 billion per year! While there have been other similar
applications, WhatsApp was the first to create a user-friendly and stable app
as a solution to the need of free texting, hence it dominated the market. Being
the first in science and technology is like being first in art. When we see the
worldwide famous art pieces from Picasso or the ‘Blaue Reiter’, we can easily
think that we could do the same. Yes, most probably, some could make the same
artwork but what matters is that they were the first to make such ingenious art
in their time, which had a certain fixed focus and understanding of art.
How have such companies been flourishing in the Bay Area? At
first glance, I think it is due to two characteristics of the west coast which
do not really exist in European culture (1) Rewarding everyone: Such companies
take care of all their employees from the lowest status workers to top
management and reward all of them whenever success if achieved (see the figure
below). (2) Valuing everyone’s idea: They create an environment that everyone
feels equal and valued. A CEO of the company may dress up in away that you may
not notice if she/he is the CEO or the one cleaning the floor. Highest
management people would communicate with the people from each level and listen
to their perspectives. These two critical aspects give the feeling of belonging
–being a piece of the puzzle– in which then every individual gives their best to
improve the work environment and the quality in a synergy. Additional 3
criteria for success in my opinion are the availability of top niche resources,
professional work ethics and quality of individuals as briefly discussed below.
(3) Resources: Presented resources should be compatible with
the targets of the organization. For example, if an institution aims to have
the market for solar-power systems, it should have sufficient resources -both
information and cash reserves- to develop innovative ideas and be ahead of
competitors.
(4) Professional work ethics: A professional organization
would have clear targets and proper methodologies to reach the targets. This
would depend on visionary leadership and talented managers. They would find and
hire the best individuals suited for the work without discriminating them by
their identity and background.
(5) Quality of individuals: Last, which may be the first in
importance, is the quality of the individuals forming the organization. The
quality of individuals at each level matters in such organizations similar to
the importance of each brick forming the Galata Tower in Istanbul. Strong
individuals are those who care about their health, their family (spending
quality of time with family), and their environment/society (helping to
charities, contributing their knowledge and feedbacks to improve the conditions
they live in). Steve Jobs once said, “A” players would like to work with “A”
players. Institutions, which value individuals at each level, invest a lot of
resources to improve their employees both at work and outside of the workplace.
Even if they are not “A” players initially, they could develop to be “A”
players in an environment that they value and are valued by. This surely pays
off well in the long run to have stable and happy team players who are loyal
and sincerely bound to the organization. In my next article, I will go into
details of such a company, and give details of how they create a
state-of-the-art innovation environment to come up with various breakthroughs.
Edit by Caroline Hojer.
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