The whole world is on an innovation jag in recent decades, certainly in all kinds of business and in consumer products and entertainment and information channels and devices. Medicine and healthcare form another broad area of accelerating innovation, outpacing the national systems in many countries, while at the same time government administration systems generally have also been transformed. The major driving forces are clearly ICT and globalisation, itself arguably a trend largely driven and facilitated by technology. That global harnessing of resources and talent is then a key factor in accelerating innovation.
There are, of course, many kinds of innovation, from Alexander Graham Bell’s ‘productisation’ (as we would call it today) of a line of experiment in voice transmission, to broadcast satellites and high speed trains, corporate and cooperative engineering to produce state of the art technologies. The computer, the engine and drawing board of most innovation, is in itself a perfect example of technology or class of products that is constantly evolving through a process of competitive innovation. That sort of thing can be cyclical, of course, for example our current trend towards centralised computing in data centres and the cloud is often compared to the original mainframe model or architecture. It certainly shows that innovation can often be more a question of an older approach or solution or idea that can be usefully applied differently using today’s resources.
Process innovation
There is also, however the less glamorous, but potentially vast, area of business and administrative process innovation. Everything that contributes to improved efficiency or speed tends to contribute to the bottom line, while improvement in customer service is clearly a factor in competitiveness. Forrester Research, for example, describes business innovation as “The transformation of a business process, market offering or business model to boost value and impact for the enterprise, customers or partners.” Pretty comprehensive, and were it not for that ‘boost value’ clause might refer to all change. On the other hand, what is clear is that innovation is not simply about new inventions and ‘Eureka!’ moments and radical new technology and patents. It can even be validly argued that an invention is not in itself innovation until transformed into product and business results.
Embracing it
That is the context in which we looked for businesses that have embraced innovation as a core concern and developed systems to cultivate, manage and where possible measure innovation across the enterprise. It is a positive recognition that every business has to constantly renew and re-invent itself and its activities. That suggests that innovation is, or should be, an ongoing process. A great deal of that thinking is behind the annual Innovation Conference in EMC, the world leader in data storage and management. Now in its fourth year, this is a programme to foster innovation that centres on an annual competition and conference where proposals from across 47,000 employees are judged. Top ideas are funded and incubated to test their value and commercial or organisational feasibility.
EMC’s fourth Innovation Conference was held last year in its centre of excellence in Cork, where a record 1,500 proposals from 26 countries were appraised through a peer review process and a voting process that involved the entire employee community online. The winners and award recipients ranged from new product ideas for major markets to internal process improvement proposals. “This has been an enormously successful programme, so much so that now the concern is to ensure that the interest and enthusiasm is spread through the year as well as the July to October run-up to the competition and conference,” says Brendan Butler, director of engineering in EMC Cork who was responsible for the 2010 Conference and is currently spearheading the implementation of one of the winning 2009 proposals. He points out that the main objective is to cultivate a culture of innovation by applying both competitive stimulus and a system to manage and progress ideas.
Continuous review
“In fact we have proven ourselves as strong innovators here in Cork over the years, especially as owners of key test processes which are continuously improved and strengthened. In 2009, for example, we went back over all of our IT and various suggestions for improvement. As a result we selected and implemented some proposals that had a strong business case; in some cases, where the technology had caught up with the idea as time passed.”
EMC Cork has had for some time its own innovation programme, challenging staff to think about process improvements or other ideas that would contribute to specific corporate strategies. “Energy was and is one major area, for example, anything to do with cloud computing is currently high on the list and we have a constant concern with improving the customer experience in every possible way,” said Butler.
No mystery
“Innovation is not a mystery, it’s not just invention and in fact anyone can play a part without being particularly creative-for example a finance manager who is open to new ideas while still watching the budgets.” Butler points to the example of ‘Constellation Computing’, an idea from the 2008 Innovation Conference that is essentially a new approach to IT resources from which the architecture and technology then flows. The concept involves hybridising the best features of in-home, network-attached storage and cloud computing. Consumers control data from a trusted in-home device without contending with the up-front costs or complexities inherent in managing a lifetime of data on a storage appliance that can fill up or fail. Constellation Computing would instead tap into storage over the Web via shared computer resources, leveraging a unique peer-to-peer structure that would be less expensive and more secure than typical cloud-based services. The concept is being actively developed by EMC.
Commitment
Another multinational with a commitment to innovation is Fujitsu. Its Irish operation currently employs over 800, principally in services such as IT consulting and projects and business process outsourcing. “We do have a business-focussed view, in that we do not regard something as innovation unless it adds value to the customer or the enterprise,” says Anthony McCauley, head of innovation in Fujitsu Ireland. “Our drive is towards incremental innovation, led by what customers want. For us, business performance innovation is in helping our clients to deliver new benefits to their customers. Within Fujitsu, we look at customer engagement innovation, but again that is always firmly linked to what they in turn want to do for their customer base.”
He uses the example of the new Criminal Courts building, where Fujitsu worked with the Courts Service to deliver a high tech videoconferencing solution for bi-location of court sessions and remote evidence giving. Over and above the orthodox videoconferencing elements, there are provisions for secure recording, transcription and other requirements of justice administration.
Sense and respond
The Fujitsu mantra that reflects the way its staff is empowered is ‘Sense and Respond’, to be conscious all the time of ways in which improvements can be made and to push ideas upwards. “The methodology is based on similar concepts to lean manufacturing, although not as mathematical, aiming to eliminate waste in every aspect of an organisation’s activity. Another major element of the innovation process is that every quarterly review of service performance with a client involves innovation as a specific heading: ‘Are we continuously improving our service?’ Annual reviews involve an independent assessor talking directly to clients, no holds barred, and include innovation as part of the assessment.”
The overall approach to customer service is based on very analytical, methodical and constant review of customer satisfaction and service performance, McCauley says. “We take the time and trouble to collect all of that information so that we can use it, building quality improvement and innovation into the service processes and in fact into the culture of the organisation. We see this also as a key differentiator for Fujitsu in a competitive market. For example our Service Desk is a pivotal point and managers and groups meet literally every day to discuss and solve issues and use what we learn as the basis to improve.”
Delivery model
At quite another end of the corporate size spectrum, Dublin software company Clavis Technology is barely three years old but addressing a global market with a cloud-based solution for data quality verification in the consumer packaged goods supply chain. This is a tightly focussed set of solutions for an area of potentially huge concern to today’s complex always-on and automated supply chains. “Data errors can lead to out of stock situations, the cardinal mistake in the distribution sector, or late payments and the obvious resultant problems for suppliers,” explains managing director Garry Moroney.
“The delivery model is software as a Service (SaaS) so the software is being constantly improved and responding to the needs of new customers as they come on board. That is in large measure why we chose to target consumer goods distribution globally, because is it one of the sectors where data quality and verification is crucial 24×7. As a small company, we have to target our development work very specifically and avoid being drawn into new areas and over-stretching our resources,” says Moroney.
For most of its first year Clavis was 100% research and development, producing both an innovative solution to crucial problems in global supply chains that were not being tackled and going directly to cloud SaaS as the most effective delivery platform. “The last two years or so have seen the software ‘productised’ and the addition of marketing and client service resources, but we are still about 50% R&D and likely to remain roughly so because the development process is constant.”
Moroney points to new developments in e-commerce which were really not on the horizon when Clavis was being set up. “We were initially dealing with purely business-to-business systems, however global and complex. Now consumers are becoming data viewers in much greater depth, dealing directly with retailers and distribution systems and that is becoming a new business driver.”
As a small Irish player and start-up, Moroney points out, Clavis had to find innovative ways of getting itself and its capabilities out to multinational giants. “We have done so by targeting GS1, the global standards and messaging body, and selling ourselves into its ecosystem. That new business model sees all grocery suppliers and 900 top retailers in the Netherlands using our software service. It is made available to them at no extra charge through GS1 and we derive an income stream from the usage.”
Writ large
Back up the corporate scale again, it is probably not well known that the largest publisher in Ireland is actually the world’s largest education publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Employing over 250 people, Dublin is a full business unit and the main innovation hub for HMH, including the corporate New Ventures and Innovation Group.
“We see our role as perpetual innovation, in content and in new ways and channels to deliver it, from traditional textbooks and teaching aids through DVDs to all of the new electronic media,” says Jim Butler, vice president of Technology Product Development. “HMH serves an educational market of student from kindergarten to US 12th grade, school leaving level. There is a perpetual process of curriculum change and development across many languages and cultures, advances in research such as different types and levels of cognitive development and, of course, smart new 21st century delivery technologies.”
HMH is engaged in a constant cycle of solving problems and meeting challenges. Renewing and developing content, the editorial process, is subject to the twin pressures of speed of production with high level quality assurance. That is essentially a ‘write once, deliver many’ model through a widening range of media and channels. Part of it, Butler explains, is a growing range of requirements for variation. “Traditionally, a teacher delivered the same lesson to a class of 30. But that could mean 30 different levels of absorption or understanding. Teaching today aims to offer innovative ways for teachers to vary their methods and also for pupils to work and progress at different rates as individually appropriate. New technology has a big part to play in that, with content broken down into ‘atomic chunks’ or learning objects that can be reconstructed and delivered in many different ways such as audiovisual ‘lessons’ on demand.”
In this vast range of activity and constant change, Butler says the important this is that innovation has to be an organic part of the corporate culture. “Along with that it is very important that the culture includes recognising that failure is OK. What counts is the effort, the lessons learned and the contribution to better progress next time. It is an inevitable part of the innovation process. I think the philosophy might be well expressed as ‘Fail fast and fail cheap-then move on.”
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