Business Forum: Photonics: Technology, business, and everything else

I felt honored to be given the opportunity to write this Business Forum column when then editor-in-chief of Laser Focus World Jeff Bairstow invited me to contribute some 20 years ago. Jeff had the foresight to know that it is good to inject business and management insight into an industry magazine. However, the time hasn’t been right until now to write this.

With this column, I would like to bring something you don’t get in any other publication. That probably implies adding commentary to reporting and using my experience to sprinkle wisdom that hopefully can be broadly applied. I do what I do because my belief is that our industry can be better off if we have more broadly knowledgeable and business-savvy engineers.

I need your feedback and guidance to pursue this goal effectively! I’d appreciate it if you are willing to play a part to help me. I encourage you to contact me ([email protected]) to develop an ongoing relationship. Tell me about what excites you and what you want to share with fellow readers of Laser Focus World.

Hearing from you and getting to know you will enable me to avoid working in an anechoic chamber, “talking” to a blank wall to become irrelevant. You can send me anything—you just have to trust my judgment to sort out whether the material is appropriate for broad dissemination. I also want you to tell me if I wrote something awry. Nothing personal! Together, we can make this column relevant, interesting, informative, and educational.

Here are a few examples of what you’ll read in future issues and how you can help me:

Commentary
Please write to me about events in your company, university, or wherever you work, and in your community. I would like you to comment on what you’ve learned and how you feel about your work and about the photonics industry. It can also be personal such as the wisdom of an “a-ha” moment, or a discovery to correct a common misconception about human nature. And like Jeff, I would like to cover social causes, too. Tell me about your community or policies you like or hate to have to live with. In short, I want to be your advocacy voice.

Interviews
The objective is to get insights from movers and shakers of our industry, and anyone who can teach us anything extraordinary that could impact our community and our personal well-being. The discussion can be on technology development, business trends, management techniques, entrepreneurial skills, government funding, and even personal philosophy in any of these areas.

I will be just as happy to learn about growing a company or mistakes to avoid. There, you can point me to individuals who you respect, and for that matter disdain. I will do my best to distill out the essence and put their experiences and viewpoints in a context to be broadly applicable.

In the case of a significant technology development, for example, I may be interviewing a company CTO or a big professor. The discussion will drift from what the technology is and what it can do to learning: how the idea was conceived, how the individual was able to secure the funding support to develop the idea, and what are the steps to bring it to fruition. We may have a similar discussion on commercialization.

For startup companies, we will very quickly drift from the excitement of the product to how the team was assembled, the business model, challenges raising money, etc. When it comes to running a business, I may be discussing what to do and what not to do.

Let’s get the show on the road!