The impact of immersion training on complementing organizational goals and accelerating culture change - a field study

At Los Alamos National Laboratory, a national defense laboratory with a history of working in seclusion and secrecy, scientists and engineers have received an important new mission to partner with industry. The scientists and engineers need to expand their skill base beyond science and understand the business of innovation to be successful in this new environment. An administrative field experiment of conducting intensive, immersion training about the commercialization process was piloted at Los Alamos in September, 1992. This Field Research Project addresses the following research question: {open_quotes}Does {open_quotes}immersion{close_quotes} commercialization training complement organizational goals and does the method accelerate cultural change?{close_quotes} The field experiment first began as a pilot Commercialization Workshop conducted for twelve scientists in September, 1992. The objective was to create commercialization action plans for promising environmental technologies. The immersion method was compared to the indoctrination method of training also. The indoctrination training was a one-day lecture style session conducted for one hundred and fifty scientists in July, 1993. The impact of the training was measured by perceived attitude change and the amount of subsequent industrial partnerships that followed the training. The key management question addressed on the job was, {open_quotes}With a limited budget, how do we maximize the impact of training and achieve the best results?{close_quotes