Ideas are easy to come by. But ideas that can make a difference are not always as easily found. Bringing innovation to bear on the way a company delivers to its customers requires a coordinated effort that identifies the right people, the right places to look, and the goals to be targeted.
John Michelsen, CTO of CA Technologies, offers his thoughts about the origin of innovation and how CIOs can formalize the practice of generating ideas that bear fruit.
Where do the ideas come from?
"Mostly all successful innovation comes from understanding customers’ problems better than they do and looking for solutions that solve unmet needs. When a customer tells us her pain points, she is often referring to a symptom. It’s our job to go one level deeper and figure out the root cause of the problem. That’s where innovation, especially useful innovation — which maps back to real problems and needs — comes from.
Who has the time on their schedule to think about, explore, and pursue innovation for the enterprise? Everyone should. Because innovators don’t really need time scheduled. They have a passion to solve problems in novel ways and they are going to do it whether you schedule time or not.
Establishing a formal process — like giving them 10% of their time to test new ideas — allows them to document and share their ideas in a context that allows others to hear and consider. Doing this used to be harder in IT than it is today: a few years ago, CIOs would tell me that they spend most of their time just running their departments. Today, with advancements in automation, virtualization and cloud technologies, the cost of managing the 80:20 has gone down dramatically. That’s a great thing for our industry. Encouraging teams to play around with ideas and giving them the safety net of taking thoughtful risks is critical for businesses to fire up their innovation engine."
Whose responsibility is it to promote this innovation?
"Innovation can — and should — come from any level and department of the company. If we think of it as a 'responsibility,' we might be stifling it by making it an expectation only from a certain set of people. Enterprises should act like internal innovation incubators: funneling new ideas into the existing portfolio and making them viable business opportunities. Taking a VC or an angel fund approach to seeding new ideas, helping them build a business case around it, and then applying scale and reach is a challenge for any enterprise. The ones that have figured out the secret sauce to getting this done emerge as the leaders in any industry."
Read Scott's article, "How CIOs can spot innovative ideas."
Puneet Sandhu is senior account executive for Hill+Knowlton Strategies
