Bill Mayo, former senior director of information technology at Biogen Idec., shares some offbeat ideas for rewarding innovation.
Watch the video or read the transcript below.
"Incentives work. If we don't reward innovation within our organization, we won't get it. If all we reward is the person who does something perfectly, safely, then all we will get is people who do things perfectly, safely. So, absolutely, the notion of rewarding is critical to the success.
The challenge is, how do you reward it?
We had one example where we gave the 'most noble failure award.' Now, we played a lot with that, because it was clearly, award for failure. We tried to work in the 'noble failure' because it wasn't about, 'Hey, I had the ERP upgrade, and I failed. Look at me.' It really had to be about the person who was pushing the envelope and really trying to create something new. And let people know, it's okay to fail sometimes when you are out on the edge like that."
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Bill Mayo is the former Senior Director of Information Technology at Biogen Idec., a global leader in biotechnology that focuses on applying immunobiology to neurodegenerative diseases. Bill spent more than 20 years with The Gillette Company / Procter & Gamble in a wide range of IT and Internal Audit roles. He has focused much of his career on leading change in a wide range of business environments. He has lead teams and projects in over 20 countries, was based in the UK for a time, and implemented hundreds of projects and multiple major business reorganizations, mergers, acquisitions and divestitures during a career that now spans more than 25 years. Bill holds a bachelor of science in computer science and a master of business administration from Northeastern University, Boston, Mass.
