- Eight in ten companies rank innovation among their top three priorities.
- But how do you create an innovation culture that embraces risks, fosters collaboration, and grants autonomy to innovation teams?
- The World Economic Forum’s Meet the Leader podcast spoke to Fidelma Russo, Chief Technology Officer at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, to get her advice on establishing and maintaining a culture conducive to innovation.
Nearly 80% of companies rank innovation among their top three priorities. And those who promote a culture of innovation, embracing risks, fostering collaboration, and granting autonomy to their teams – are 60% more likely to be innovation leaders. This is according to research by Boston Consulting Group (BCG).
But how do you build an innovation culture as a business? Who better to ask than Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). Meet the Leader’s Linda Lacina talked to Fidelma Russo, CTO at HPE about her five top tips for creating an innovation culture.
Invest in experimentation
When money gets tight, innovation budgets often get curtailed. Instead, management consultants BCG say, companies should embrace innovation even in challenging times.
This means making room for experimentation and allocating adequate budgets to it.
Fidelma Russo recommends that about 10% of the R&D budget should be allocated to experimentation.
“That seems like a lot, but there’s always money in everybody’s budget that’s being spent on what I would call sedimentation,” she says, advocating for leaders to find ways to ring fence those budgets.
“If we don’t find that money and use it to do things that may be something of a moonshot, or a crazy idea, then you’re not allowing your team to think outside the box enough. And you’re going to miss an opportunity.”
Break the cycle
Making plans and projections is important for businesses, but Russo says in technology there must always be space for flexibility.
“The yearly planning cycle is actually somewhat stifling, because in technology, cycles tend not to align with yearly planning cycles,” she explains. “They don’t care about our calendars, they don’t care about our budget cycles.”
She gives the example of generative AI which has seen rapid development in recent years. Rather than holding out for the next planning cycle, HPE teams were encouraged to explore the benefits of AI in their work immediately, accelerating traditional processes and product trajectories as a result.
Spark inspiration
Russo also points to the importance of HPE’s conferences, such as HPE Tech Con, because of their ability to overcome departmental silos and showcase a range of talents. This can get teams excited about what’s possible – and think about capabilities in new ways.
“The best thing about this event is that it brings together people across the company. In a company like Hewlett Packard Enterprise, even though it’s a massive company with 60,000 people, you end up working with a very small set of people. So, an event like this breaks down those silos and barriers.”
Russo names developments such as liquid cooling, blade servers and hybrid cloud innovations as outcomes of past HPE Tech Con events.
Discover
How is the World Economic Forum creating guardrails for Artificial Intelligence?
In response to the uncertainties surrounding generative AI and the need for robust AI governance frameworks to ensure responsible and beneficial outcomes for all, the Forum’s Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (C4IR) has launched the AI Governance Alliance.
The Alliance will unite industry leaders, governments, academic institutions, and civil society organizations to champion responsible global design and release of transparent and inclusive AI systems.
Think outside in
Another critical mindset considering outside perspectives – and making room for collaborating with those outside your organization, including customers and partners. Those with other capabilities and perspectives will find ways to solve problems you hadn’t considered.
“That is incredibly important these days, especially as product cycles get shorter and shorter. We are continuously trying to ensure that our engineers are much more exposed to the use cases that our customers are seeing and that we co-innovate with customers,” Russo explains.
“We are lucky to have customers who want to do that with us, and find places where we can test it out together at their sites.”
Strengthen internal networks
Young engineers and technical staff are another group Russo wants to encourage to overcome silos and build their internal professional networks early on.
“We’re encouraging them to submit papers and we also have nominations to bring our young talent to these events, so that they can mingle and get mentorship from talent that’s been around the block a while.
“It’s really critical that they start to form networks and collaborate across the company. This creates a much more dynamic organization.”
In essence, the key to an innovation culture, according to Fidelma Russo, is in establishing a well-connected ecosystem of people both within and outside of the organization, staying agile to take new developments on board and ensuring innovation continues to be funded even against a background of continued uncertainty.
This article originally appeared at https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2024/08/5-ways-to-build-innovation-culture-hpe-cto/, and is written and copywrited by Andrea Willige. It has been reproduced without direct embedding of the included podcast and video, which are linked within the article here. License and Republishing: World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License, and in accordance with our Terms of Use.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.
