‘Turning innovation into value’ was the subject of a BT breakfast discussion held at the World Economic Forum in January. Top business leaders, including BT CEO, Ben Verwaayen, sought to identify the nature of innovation in today’s business environment and answer a number of key questions. Will innovative new products and services emerge simply by increasing R&D investment? Is something more needed? How do we turn innovation into value, and can a large company really be innovative anyway?
“I asked a room full of recent graduates: what is the greatest obstacle to getting your ideas heard?” Ben Verwaayen said. “And one 25-year old at the back of the room put up his hand and said: ‘you! You don’t understand what is going on in my head and you don’t understand what I’m saying when I try to tell you.’”
What this implies, in other words, is that innovation is an organisational attitude. As a CEO you need to allow room for people, young and old, to express their ideas. Just as important is giving employees with great ideas access to people who can help them realise those ideas. Companies need to build this in to their organisational structures.
“We’re good at coming up with brilliant ideas in Europe, but terrible at taking them to market because of the status quo,” continued Ben Verwaayen. “There is no lack of people with ideas, but there is a lack of access to people who have the resources to put them into action.”
Innovation isn’t just an internal issue, however. It affects the relationship a company has with its customers. This is particularly true at BT. Innovation for us includes the ability to create innovative business models to meet the needs of our customers, as well as creating new technologies and devices.
Matt Bross, BT CTO, explains this dual role of innovation as enhancing the quality of people’s lives and the businesses of companies that deal with BT.
“We have to innovate in innovation,” he said. “That may sound strange, but it means innovating all along the line from thinking of a new product or service or way of doing business, to making a commercial success of the idea.”
Matt Bross calls this the ‘innovation continuum’, and the key thing is that it depends on the environment you’re in. “There will be different priorities to innovation if you’re surviving the aftermath of an earthquake or looking for the next cool gadget,” he says.
These are really the keys to turning innovation into value. You have to build innovation into the fabric of your organisation in order for it to flourish. You have to embrace innovation in everything you do, not just in your R&D department. And you have to align innovative activities with the environment you’re operating in. We’re trying to take these principals to heart at BT, and I hope our customers are seeing the benefits in everything from new products, like BT Fusion, to the way we structure long-term outsourcing contracts or design innovative new customer service models.
You can hear more about the BT breakfast discussion and other World Economic Forum activities at our WEF website, www.bt.com/wef.
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