Okay, let's get rolling.
Asgard: Year 12Month 1: You started organizing 5 engineers, 5 skilled workers and some unskilled workers started working on the new Aeronautical steel. Basically you wanted to mass manufacture your sword. You remember that you made your sword using a very complicated process, including many folds and mixing in many exotic minerals, including Vo/Vulcanium,
Thorium, pure Phlogiston, crystallium, and many others. You know that you have to cut corners... -> solid success. You understand that you need the strength, and not the hardness of this material. You decided that only Volcanium and some crystallium is necessary for a toned down product. Volcanium is readily available at industrially available quantities; crystallium not but at least you can buy them up from market periodically. You also remember that Bearland produces quite a lot of crystallium.
Month 2: after you got the basic composition right, you move to its manufacturing process. -> normal fail: Unfortunately, the cutting down in materials means a lot more processing is needed for the material. The current process developed needed even more repeated heating, beating and cooling cycles, and worse the materials can only be forged rather than machined.
Month 3: -> Normal fail. Things are not getting any better, and you decide that aeronautical steel is only as good as it is today. You see no point in spending time on this in the short term.
EXP gainLevel up! Exotic Science is now Level 3! Future work in exotic science is easier.
1 Engineer leveled up to
Exotic Scientist!1 Unskilled worker become skilled!
I think I should stop here as everyone (including me) should get a grasp of how things are done. Basically, if you put more effort and people into a job, it will have a higher chance to succeed. You can stop at anytime, but unless you stop development at a very early stage, though, they can figure things out by themselves if you let them to.
Also, people can level up, and to simplify things I would only do this after somewhere between 3-12 months (depends on game pace). Engineers into scientists, Skilled workers into engineers, and unskilled workers into skilled ones. Note that its the age of new discoveries so knowledge spread much faster than you will expect.
p.s.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-29423147 You must see this.