Business Technology: Build Your Company’s Receptor Capacity

We need to build our capacity to understand new ideas, the co-CEO of Research In Motion says, so we’ll be better prepared for a future that’s rushing toward us.

When’s the last time you heard someone speak passionately and movingly about "receptor capacity"? For me it was last week, and like so many great ideas, in hindsight it seems perfectly obvious. And indeed, after someone else does the breakthrough thinking and then shares it with us regular mortals, then it certainly is obvious. In this case, it’s a perspective everyone in this tumultuous business ought to think about.

"Universities today are leading industry, not the other way around," Lazaridis said. And that’s precisely how it should be. "Industry needs to build up our receptor capacity to understand the research that top university students are doing today. Often we don’t understand it, and we somehow make that the students’ problem. But maybe the reason we don’t understand it is that we just don’t understand it. And these students are decades ahead of us, and it’s not their problem that we don’t understand what they’re telling us."

By Bob Evans
InformationWeek