What is a Technical Visionary?

I have heard the term “technical visionary” as a job title recently. This is a not a traditional and well-understood title, so I thought I’d look around to see if I can work out what it might entail.

Rags Srinivas, CTO of Sun’s Technology Outreach team seems to qualify as a technical visionary. His background includes teaching and software development. As for key responsibilities, he cites:

• Think ahead: What’s down the road?
• Help steer along technology releases.
• Support the rest of the staff

In the field of industrial physics, it appears there is a more rigorous definition:

Industrial technical visionaries are defined as ‘technical individuals who effectively synthesize multiple technologies and business strategy to identify new and innovative breakthrough products and processes’.

In August 2007, a paper was published by the IEEE titled Motivating Technical Visionaries in Large American Companies (login required). Although skirting around an exact definition of the role, the paper does discuss some ways to recognise or characterise a technical visionary:

Technical visionaries, while rather rare, and thus, difficult to systematically study [19], [63], are instrumental to the new product development (NPD) portfolio through their ability to spot and see the potential for breakthrough opportunities, and as such, are part of the key to success for many technology-driven organizations.

The new product development literature focusing on the fuzzy front-end of the NPD process has hinted at the idea of a key individual who is responsible for creatively melding the technology and market insights that occur during this stage [36], [41]. The opportunity recognition literature supports this view as well [8], proposing that it takes a very unique person who possesses both technical and market vision to be successful at identifying opportunities.

Because technical visionaries are, by definition, different from the typical population of engineers, we also expect them to be motivated somewhat differently than more typical or average engineers. The creativity literature suggests that they will be motivated by the job or problem at hand [55], [58] and by the amount of freedom that they receive [58], and that these factors will influence them more than they influence other technical professionals.

Outside the corporate and academic world of definitions and job titles, there exist people popularly accepted as technical visionaries, such as Wayne Green, characterised by radical thought:

Wayne … still has the dynamism and ability to ‘think outside the box’ that has driven him throughout his life.

and strong opinions

Wayne seems to have had views on everything, so it’s a certainly that almost everyone will disagree with him on some point or other.

There don’t seem to be many job openings on the job sites for technical visionaries, but I did find one which describes the desired skills as:

• Excel in multiple programming languages
• Both the left and right sides of your brain work! (well-rounded)
• Not afraid of taking risks and challenging conventional wisdom
• Have an entrepreneurial, whatever-it-takes spirit
• Like the excitement of working within a small start-up team
• Have high energy and enthusiasm towards what you do

Although these sources all differ on some details, the general sweep of the descriptions seems to be the broadly the same. I’ll try and summarise them into a single definition.

A Technical Visionary has a varied background (technical, teaching, a bit of business etc.), possesses both marketing vision and very good technical skills, has enthusiasm and strong opinions, is not afraid of challenging conventional wisdom, has a whatever-it-takes spirit, and is motivated by challenges and the freedom to address them.

Above all, such people are rare and very valuable. So if you find any, do whatever it takes to keep them and use them to benefit your business!