One of the topics that I spend a lot of time on is working with the companies in the center that I lead is trying to accelerate the adoption of new technologies and approaches. I used to think that the key limitation was a lack of awareness, so I spent a lot of time on presentations and workshops. Then, I realized that it was not so much the lack of awareness, but, I thought, the lack of experiments and trials. So then, the attention shifted more to working with companies on trials, experiments and prototypes. However, more recently, my experience is that engineers like technology and experiment with it, both at work and outside of it. The key challenge is translating the new technology and approach to concrete product development of “sharp” products. At that point, many stakeholders come involved, the cost go up drastically and the implications of failures start to really hurt. This is where the risk averseness really kicks in and people prefer to continue to do things as they have always done them. And this is even more the case if there are implications for the business model. Although I may be wrong, it seems that I have finally found the real bottleneck. Of course, many of us struggle with spending large amounts of energy on things that, in the end, are not the real bottleneck. So, for today’s reflection: are you sure you’re working on the real bottleneck? Or is it just a symptom and you need to dig deeper for the root cause?