Acclaimed academic Tom Allen believes Ireland needs more entrepreneurs in biotechnology, writes Frank Dillon

PROFESSOR TOM Allen can lay claim to a curve. The septuagenarian MIT Sloan professor undertook research in the 1970s to examine how the distance between engineers offices affected the frequency of their communication.

Like many interesting facets of knowledge it has a touch of the obvious about it. The findings, published in his book Managing the flow of Flow of Technology, confirmed that there was indeed a strong correlation between physical distance and the frequency of communication.

Hence the arrival of the Allen Curve, which suggests that for engineers to collaborate successfully, they should be located no more than 50 metres apart and on the same floor of a building.

Interesting, no doubt, for office managers, but incredibly significant for those hoping to foster innovation in their workplace or environment. After all, the better communication between engineers plays a key role in fostering innovation.

"The way people interact together is influenced by both organisational structure and space. If you bring the two together, then managers have a more effective way of structuring their interactions that leads to innovation," he says.

Many engineering-intensive businesses were traditionally organised in silos, both in terms of management structures and the physical layout of work environment. Allen says that approach often acts as a barrier to the innovation process. At a simple level, for example, there is often a lack of awareness of relevant intellectual resources within an organisation.

"We have heard so many different stories of how people within an organisation searched widely for someone with a particular type of knowledge only to find that the right person was working within their own organisation, perhaps in an adjacent building," he notes.

Allen's theories have proved influential within the commercial architecture profession and he has partnered with several architects over the years to design specific buildings. A number of key building designs including the Decker Building in New York, the Steelcase Development Centre in Michigan and BMW's research centre in Munich, have been strongly influenced by his work.

A common denominator is an attempt to break down the formalised silos, so closed workspaces, which encourage isolation, are eschewed in favour of open plan layouts which encourage greater levels of daily interaction. While some executives have private offices, typically they are glass-walled, so they remain visible.

According to Allen, the transparency of the glass supports the idea that managers have the freedom to make their own decisions within their own realms of responsibility but also to influence the decisions of those seen through the glass.

The other key feature is common spaces with comfortable couches and coffee bars that promote informal conversations between colleagues and a pooling of ideas.

In an ideal environment, managers across different functional areas get the opportunity to interact, so technical people get to talk to marketing and finance managers, to gain a broader understand of the commercial potential of ideas.

"If you think about the basis of innovation, it's about combining customer needs with technical capabilities. To achieve commercial success, typically you want solutions to identified needs rather than technologies seeking problems."

Allen accepts that there are sometimes exceptions to this principle, however. Entrepreneurs such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were not excessively focused on established market needs in the early days and their innovations created markets in personal competing that were previously unimagined, he notes.

When designing an interactive workplace, distinctions should be made between sectors where information is changing rapidly and where there is less rapid change.

"Where there is rapid information change, managers need to stay closer to that and organise themselves around more specialist groups in their own areas. Theres often a need for a trade off in that respect.

The same principles apply to small businesses, one of the key reasons why SMEs in the same sector should try to cluster geographically, wherever possible. "It's a simple fact that many small firms dont have their own canteen facilities. Local coffee shops can therefore serve as real centres of innovative interaction."

Allen, now one of the key global thinkers in the innovation space, is in Dublin this week to address a conference at the Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School in UCD.

Hes no stranger to the college or to Ireland, having held positions as visiting professor at UCD and as director of the National Institute for Technology Management here during the 1990s.

Born to a working class second generation Irish family in Newark, New Jersey, Allen became an MIT professor "by accident", as he likes to put it.

While working as an engineer in Boeing, he came across brochures for what is now known as the Alfred P Sloan School of Management and began taking courses. This led eventually to a Ph D programme and a life-long academic career.

Reflecting on his experiences in Ireland in recent years, Allen says that we have benefited more from globalisation than we perhaps realised and that we should take a positive approach to current economic challenges.

Ireland has "raised its innovation levels tremendously" in the ICT industries over the past 20 years, he believes. One of the challenges for the country now was to do the same in the biotechnology sector.

The Governments policy of investment in fundamental research in this field was a good start but it needed to be enhanced through greater entrepreneurship from those who had a good knowledge of the sector. "What we often see in other areas is people who have done well as entrepreneurs ploughing money back as venture capital investors. This has not happened in biotechnology here. We need more biotechnology people to become entrepreneurs and we should look at way of encouraging this.

One suggestion he has made to the Government here is to sponsor post-doctoral research programmes so that Irish companies in this field can spend time at some of the leading research campuses in north America, for example. "They need to go there and breath-in the atmosphere to inspire them," he says.

• Professor Tom Allen will be presenting a paper at a conference entitled Innovation in Complex Social Systems, at the UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School from December 10th to 12th