Being complacent is not a good thing

Perhaps it is the natural cycle of going from a new recruit in the company to getting used to the surrounding. I used to have a lot of ideas when I first got into the company I was working in. I believed that the R&D process could be sped up immensely by using semi-automation techniques and let the machines we use work through the night producing results that we could evaluate through the day.

I had dreams that I wanted to semi-automate many of the measurement systems and processing systems to make unattended batch processing feasible. Things like that shouldn't be too hard to make, all you need is a sample loader and a mechanism to program in a batch recipe and some error handling (the assumption part is the "all you need" part).

The problem is that with all these ideas, I would have needed the time and resources to put this into action and the problem is that getting the required level of funding and support would have been a pain in the rear. So I but the bullet and decided to work with the system to get the job done like everyone else did.

I personally think that this is the way that many good ideas die, just because people don't have the finding, time or the freedom to give it a shot, because we are stuck work that "needs" to be done and have to little time to do find ways that the current job could be done better or new things to try.

Most of the best ideas and biggest successes came out of skunkworks project, were people were able to make things out of shoe string budgets, putting in their own time to make something. Not everything worked, but some of the biggest successes have been huge. For example, a company like Sony's first venture into the gaming world was not the result of the playstation but by Ken Kutaragi underground working with Nintendo on using the the SPC700 chip that sony developed as Nintendo's sound chip. It was after that that (and must scolding from Sony's executive, that Ken would eventually fire) that Sony got into the console business.

There are probably many examples in history where employees have come up with great ideas that would turn out to be money makers that the executives would never understand. Xerox also had the same problem with the development with the graphical OS and the mouse which Apple and Microsoft would steal for their own computers.

Not all ideas have been good, but so long as the required funds and time is small enough that shouldn't be too much of a problem. If you keep trying, eventually, you'll make a hit. The most important part is the trying, and I believe that companies that don't foster that will probably end up dying.