Innovation roundtable

Roundtable:
Richard Dumas, TrueContext
Sebastien Marineau, QNX
Don Campbell, Cognos
Graham Brown, Corel
Frederic Boulanger, Macadamian (moderator)

Another successful and insightful roundtable - we saw how four companies, from startup to Canada's largest ISV, fostered innovation and captured ideas. Here are some of the highlights (note that the responses are paraphrased):

FB: Where do ideas come from?

• RD: TrueContext is a startup, and everyone is focused on the goal of the product. Innovation is ingrained in the way we live day to day. Our processes aren't as formal as the larger companies - the ideas come from all over - it's a mixed bag, from developers to product managers.
• SM: QNX is an operating system company - very technical, and very free and innovative (maybe a little too free). The short to mid-term ideas come mostly from the product managers. The long-term ideas (e.g. the "next QNX" ideas) come from a few visionaries.
• DC: Cognos is the largest software company in Canada, and our customers are Fortune 1000 companies. The challenge is that innovation can take a back-seat to the needs of these large customers. We have built an organization, which I head - my title is VP of Innovation and Technology to look at new ideas coming from the rest of the company. We'll get intothe process behind that later.
• GB: Corel has been in a wide range of businesses over the years - SCSI hardware to graphics software to consumer software to business productivity. In the boom we would tackle any idea and opportunity that came along. Now we are much more process oriented - we have created a business unit called New Ventures that looks at ideas coming from all over the company.

FB: How do you balance vetting new ideas while encouraging innovation? How do you evaluate and refuse certain ideas while still keeping people motivated to contribute new ideas? There's a paradox there that I'd like to explore.

• GB: Often, just having the ability and venue to bring up new ideas to your manager, be they new product ideas, or as is more often the case, a new feature, is motivation enough. The important thing as an employee is - am I being listened to and is my idea being taken seriously?
• SM:For the employee, there's nothing more satisfying than seeing the idea through, so if possible we like the originator of the idea to take ownership. We also try to put aside some time for people to prototype and run with new ideas.
• RD: As an early-stage startup, people are focused on building and releasing the product - so the process of vetting an idea happens very quickly. We have a couple different mechanisms for capturing ideas - the main one being a product management database. Ultimately the product manager makes the decision - should this feature be implemented? Most of the time, the originator of the idea doesn't get ownership - it simply gets assigned to whoever has the bandwidth. Again, it's fairly informal and ad hoc - it often becomes a matter of developers approaching the product manager, or myself, with ideas for new features, and we make a call on whether or not we need it and if we have the bandwidth to run with it.
• DC: There have been many HR studies that show that the #1 impact to motivation is - am I making a difference? If they can be part of their idea, motivation goes through the roof. We try to let technical people be a part of bringing their idea to life. It's also an opportunity to cycle people around to different ideas/teams so people don't get stale.

FB: What do you do with ideas that are non-core or don't fit with the business model? Again, this is creativity, which you want to encourage, but you might not be able to execute or it doesn't make sense to the business. How do you vet these without squashing innovation?

• GB:You can design a process where you can encourage and capture all ideas - crazy or not. We tried this and called it the "virtual garage". We did get a lot of ideas, but some of them we couldn't execute on, and the real problem was the same idea would come up again and again. It was demotivating for the employees, because the ideas were being constantly rejected, and demotivating for those on the vetting team who would have to write the same letter over and over again to different people explaining why this idea was being rejected. Effectively we were squashing innovation... so that was a learning process. What we did was implemented a system where the submitter had a self-vetting process. They filled out a short form to answer a few simple questions. Essentially it asked them to explain how the idea clears each gate (ie. could we execute, does it fit in one of our business units, etc.). If the employee had trouble with the form, they could see their manager, who could help walk them through the questions.
• DC: We have a similar system. Our "idea form" has five categories - things like "where's our break-even for this idea (6-8 months, 12-16 months...)?", etc. They aren't black and white, but rather the questions are ranked, and the answers are weighted (the employee isn't aware of how they are weighted - it's all very objective to detach the emotion from the decision). It's possible a technical person doesn't know all the answers, but maybe they will learn something - the innovation team is there to help them with the process.
• SM & RD: a lot of the ideas are shared in the hallways, and vetted informally, so it's hard to put a finger on the process. Everyone's focused on a single goal, so we don't really see people being demotivated by ideas that don't make the cut.

FB: Who is part of the vetting committee for evaluating new ideas?

• DC: At Cognos the idea has to be owned by a business unit who will see it through rather than one committee. The gates the idea has to pass through are based on roles - things like "does our engineering team have enough resources to execute on the idea?", "does our field team have the capacity?". Maybe it's a good idea but the timing is wrong to execute to it goes on the shelf for a while. The goal is to take the emotion and subjectivity out of the decision - the idea passes through the gate or it doesn't.
• GB:We're the opposite actually - for new features the vetting committee usually consists of two product managers, someone in marketing, and manager at the director level (to give the perspective on whether or not we have the resources). The other extreme is New Ventures, which is a business unit at Corel that acts as an incubator - modeled after incubators like IdeaLab. New Ventures is looking at three ideas at any time. It has it's own vetting committee - a board of directors who are responsible for approving the idea through each gate. Stage 1 is looking at existing market research to determine if there is a market. Stage 2 looks at validating the market research with our own research - talking to customers etc. Stage 3 is a prototype (e.g. Flash) that we present to potential customers.

FB: Sebastien, I understand that QNX has had some experience with skunkworks projects. Could you talk about that?

• SM: Sure. To give you some history - QNX has traditionally been an operating system company. We've always believed in UNIX-like development, and not in visual environments. The trouble was some of our competitors, like WindRiver, had great visual IDEs for developing on their OS. So in November of 2001 we decided to build a an IDE on Eclipse. We rented a space, separate from our head office, in a mini-mall that we called the Toolshed. We took roughly 10 of our best developers to work on the IDE project, which was to be delivered in Spring of 2002. This freed the developers from legacy problems - at head office, it's hard to focus because they are resources to the rest of the team. At the Toolshed, they had a very clear mission about what needed to be done - we were out to compete head to head with WindRiver on tools. You couldn't do this with any project... it has to be one of those "do or die" situations.

FB: What doesn't work?

• GB: The employee has to feel like they are being listened to and that their ideas are being taken seriously. If they don't, you will squash the innovative spirit - this is a mistake we made early on. They also have to have time to work on ideas. It's hard to live up to the 3M model - putting aside 15% of their time to work on new ideas, but even if you can put aside 2% you're making the effort and it can be very motivating. The other thing we found is that you have to make the process public and transparent - so people can see the process working.

FB: Don, I understand that Cognos is very good at involving customers in the development of new ideas and products. Can you tell us about that?

• DC: Some of the most successful products at Cognos came from a joint incubation with a customers. We try to engage the customer early on in the process. The team is often a combination of my team and the field team, who understands the customer's needs and space. Another source of innovation is our partners, from the big ones like Intel and IBM, where we explore the places where our technology touches theirs and where they are going, to the smaller companies that have a core technology that adds value to our offering. Finally, one source of innovation that I feel software companies ignore is the research community. Often a problem you're working on has already been solved by a researcher, who has been working on the issue for years. Here in Ottawa, OCRI is working on ways to create links between researchers and companies - to help make it easier for companies to find research.

FB: How do you budget for innovative ideas?

• RD: It's not formalized - I have a lot of leeway to be able to say "that's a great idea - I want you two guys to go away and work on this for the next few weeks".
• SM: Same here.
• DC: We have a budget set aside for patents. By the way, do you know how many software companies reward their employees for filing patents? 35%. The number that reward on successful patents is only a little more - around 50%. For other ideas - if there is an opportunity there, and it doesn't fit into one of the business units, I have a discretionary budget that we can use to work on the idea.

FB: Finally, what books would you recommend on Innovation?

• GB: "It's Not the Big That Eat the Small...It's the Fast That Eat the Slow". Also, the Conference Board of Canada has published lots of material on Innovation.
• DC: A few books come to mind: The Innovators Dilemma,and Jack Welch's book, which talks about how they made GE an innovative company. One topic that I find really interesting is intrapreneurship - how can you be an entrepreneur inside a larger company, rather than taking the idea away to found a new company. If you do a search on intrapreneurship on the web you'll find lots of good material.
• SM: We encourage our developers to read technical journals - there has been a lot of research done, especially in operating systems, that can be a source of new ideas and that isn't covered in Dr. Dobbs. I have two cautions though - one is that the research may be patented, and that the language is not what you're used to if you've been away from academia for a while, so it can be a bit tough to get through.

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