Creating a culture of innovation is essential for any technology company to succeed. Good Technology, CTO Nicko van Someren, explains how he encourages innovation at his company — and how expectations and deadlines can interfere.
The Enterprisers Project (TEP): With the enterprise customers Good has, almost any risk would seem to be unacceptable. How do you balance the need for innovation against the need to avoid security risk?
Van Someren: The security landscape is constantly changing, so there is an ongoing need for innovation and development of new technologies. Employees are always bringing new devices into an organization — smartphones, tablets, wearables, etc. So as a mobile security company, we have to continuously innovate to allow our customers to deal with the influx of new technologies, new devices and the applications running on them. In that sense, innovation and business problems work hand-in-hand. New solutions directly address areas of need.
TEP: What advice would you pass along to CIOs or CTOs about fostering technological innovation in a large, well-established company?
Van Someren: While innovation is the responsibility of all employees within an organization, the role naturally fits under the CIO and the CTO as the lead drivers of innovation and technological change. CIOs and CTOs must understand that innovation will not always be successful. You cannot ask employees to experiment and expect every aspect of that experiment to work. If every experiment is successful then your team isn't challenging itself and stepping outside the box.
Finally, it's important to keep in mind that the CIO and CTO approach innovation differently within a company. The CIO spearheads how his or her company can strategically apply new technology, and it's the CTO's responsibility to apply new technology to do something different in order to create a new source of innovation. For example, a CIO will be driving innovation to find more powerful ways to mine the company's data so as to better serve customers, and the CTO will drive innovation to mine the company's data to open up a new line of business.
TEP: What are the biggest obstacles to innovation?
Van Someren: CIOs and CTOs shouldn't let organizational structure stifle innovation. Of course you need to hire top talent, but giving them the space to innovate will produce the best results. Getting bogged down in timelines and metrics will only impede the innovation that would be naturally happening otherwise. Timelines are particularly restrictive since they donít foster creativity--they actually have the opposite effect. If your team is working against a set timeline for innovation, they will only do things to which they already know the answer.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCE
Download "A Taxonomy of Innovation," a free Harvard Business Review article that shows technologists in all stages of innovation methods that are useful to take their next step.
Dr. Nicko van Someren is the Chief Technology Officer of Good Technology where he is in charge of future technology strategy and research. Nicko has extensive experience in the security industry. Prior to joining Good he served as Chief Security Architect at Juniper Networks, responsible for leading the technology and design direction for the company's Network Security products, as well as promoting Juniper's security solutions to industry and government sectors. Before joining Juniper, Dr. van Someren was founder and CTO of the security technology company nCipher Plc. where he led the research team and directed the technical development. Dr. van Someren holds a doctorate and First Class degree in computer science from Cambridge University in the UK. He is a fellow of both the Royal Academy of Engineering and the British Computer Society.
