2009 Issue 1 - Raytheon

LEADERS CORNER
John Zolper
Corporate Vice President, Research and Development
Technology Today recently sat down
with John Zolper to address the
importance of mining fresh ideas
within Raytheon’s Engineering, Technology
and Mission Assurance community, as well
as the programs that have been implemented
to nurture such innovation. He also
discusses his experiences from a broad
career prior to joining Raytheon.
TT: What are your chief responsibilities?
JZ: Together with [VP of Corporate
Technology and Research] Heidi Shyu, we
collaborate with technologists across the
company to look strategically across our
technology portfolio for opportunities to
move the company forward. One of the
areas that I’m particularly responsible for is
looking at corporate innovation activities —
ways to nurture new technology ideas and
bring them forward across the company.
TT: Coming up on your one-year anniversary
with Raytheon, what are some of your
impressions of the company and its people?
JZ: What first attracted me to the company
is its core interest in technology and its tens
of thousands of engineers. My impression
is that there’s a strong core technology
base and a lot of very talented and capable
people. What I’m trying to do is leverage
the workforce and bring their expertise forward
into some new opportunities.
TT: Let’s say you’re an engineer in a
Raytheon business. How do you get your
innovative ideas heard?
JZ: Programmatically, there are two primary
opportunities that we offer to complement
the businesses’ technology planning
processes — both of which we’re looking
to expand. The first is the IDEA program,
which is a corporate-funded activity where
anybody in the company can put in a brief
white paper and propose to get up to
$50,000 just to flush out their idea. For the
first time last year, we identified an
Innovator of the Year to go with the IDEA
program. The person who won was Duong
Nguyen from Raytheon Intelligence and
Information Systems. He had a proposal
that was funded out of the IDEA program
and then subsequently won an award from
the National Reconnaissance Office for
$400,000. So his initial idea was taken to
the next step and beyond.
TT: What’s the second opportunity for
people to bring forward their ideas?
JZ: The Raytheon Innovation Challenge.
This past year we identified five technical
areas that the Department of Homeland
Security considers high-priority technology
needs. Then we posted technical challenge
statements out to the company through
lunchtime seminars, announcements and
presentations at the technology symposiums.
We also sent e-mails to the engineers
across the company, asking them to
submit brief white papers on ideas that
would address those challenge areas.
TT: I would imagine you probably received
hundreds of submissions.
JZ: Yes, we received 231 white papers. We
had a team from Corporate Technology
and Research review and evaluate them
with input from the businesses. We then
recommended 51 of those white paper
authors to come to a workshop to build on
those ideas. The next step was to identify
eight outputs from that workshop. Some of
them were a direct one-to-one mapping to
the original white papers; others were
broader ideas developed at the workshop.
We gave them funding for one month to
go and flush out those ideas. Basically, they
start with this initial nugget of an idea, and
then we want them to really dig into the
ideas to identify a potential path forward.
TT: Generally speaking, how do you decide
which ideas to develop and fund?
JZ: That’s always a key challenge with any
research project. Part of it is in asking the
questions, making sure you’re articulating
what you’re looking for. Giving good, clear
guidance is important. How to effectively
communicate your ideas is something we
need to nurture across the company. You
ask for specific responses regarding what
their technical approach is, what their
quantified milestones are, and how their
plan will progress toward an ultimate goal.
Basically, it’s in the way people articulate
their proposed solution and the credibility
of their concepts.
TT: How did your experience at DARPA and
other government labs help prepare you for
this position?
JZ: The opportunity at DARPA allowed me
to drive a whole technology area by putting
together a program and bringing in the
leading performers across the country. I first
worked as a program manager, then as a
deputy office director, then, the last three
years I was director of the Microsystems
Technology Office. The experience helped
me gain valuable insight into how people
think about technology. It also taught me
how to lead and inspire people to bring
forward new technical ideas. It all comes
down to finding the right people and then
giving them the resources and time to
flourish and develop their ideas.
TT: What’s Raytheon’s technology vision
going forward?
JZ: Our vision is to maintain world-class
technology and then strengthen Raytheon’s
position across a broad range of technologies.
The world is rapidly changing and it’s
essential that we respond and change to it.
Our activities in corporate innovation and
our technology projects are focused on
positioning us to maintain that technology
leadership. Five or 10 years from now, our
goal would be to have Raytheon still
identified as a technology leader within the
defense industry — an industry that will
likely be very different than it is today.
RAYTHEON TECHNOLOGY TODAY 2009 ISSUE 1 27