54% of CEOs Dissatisfied With Innovation 210
athloi writes "Invention is new and clever; innovation is a process that takes knowledge and uses it to get a payback. Invention without a financial return is just an expense. Ideas are really the sexy part of innovation and there's rarely a shortage of them. If you look at the biggest problems around innovation, rarely does a lack of ideas come up as one of the top obstacles; instead, it's things like a risk-averse culture, overly lengthy development times and lack of coordination within the company. Not enough ideas, on the other hand, is an obstacle for only 17 percent. At the end of the day all that creativity and all those ideas have to show on the bottom line. The goal of innovation is to make or save money, and IT should never lose sight of that central fact."
97% of Innovators Dissastisfied with CEOs (Score:5, Insightful)
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Oh yeah, a monopolist with absurd margins.
Only businesses with insane margins can afford dedicated R&D like Bell Labs. For most companies, R&D is a luxury.
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We still get to do cool stuff and every once in a while, we have something that gets monetized. But for the most part, we work on cool stuff and the demos keep the management happy.
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Re:97% of Innovators Dissastisfied with CEOs (Score:5, Insightful)
From my experience, in a lot of companies, they just don't want to innovate.
Doing the exact same thing with a computer application instead of a typewritten form isn't innovation. I'm sorry, it just isn't. An optimization that doesn't change the process at all, isn't it. Innovation is when you figure that you can turn the process upside down, and do things like they _weren't_ done before. When Ford figured out he'd use an assembly line instead of the old fashioned way, that was innovation. If Ford had just hired a faster courier boy to carry the forms from one beancounter to another (which is what a lot of computer apps really are today: just a faster way to do the exact same thing with the same people), that would be at most a straightforward optimization.
But when you want to shake up the process, you run into a lot of managers and egos which would be displaced by the new version. And there in a lot of places is where it fails. Try explaining to someone that his function will lose some power or prestige when your cool new system goes online, and see what kind of disproportionate resources he'll mobilize against it. Or try explaining to an old dog that he must learn new tricks, and see real resistance in action.
Remember, a lot of these are guys who know how to backstab, brownnose or make backroom deals, when they need to. In a lot of cases that's the only skill that got them there in the first place. If you think they'll just bend over and take it just because a techie figured out how to displace them, you may be surprised.
So what will happen in a lot of places is that they don't really want innovation. They want to keep their power and influence intact, and keep doing things like they were always done. With a computer, maybe, but nevertheless in the exact same way.
If the old process required that a form doesn't even have a registration number before a beancounter uses his stamp to give it one, don't be surprised if the requirement for the computer version says the record may not have an ID until the beancounter gives it one. That's his "power" there: he's the guy (or the boss of the guy) who gives registration numbers. He's not going to give that up. (Don't laugh, I've actually been in a team which implemented exactly that. We actually had a hidden unique ID, while the one assigned by the beancounter was only for display purposes.)
That's not innovation.
The budget is an excuse there. In a lot of places, the budget isn't even really calculated as in "what can we get for how much money", but a function of:
- corporate politics and petty wars and power grabs between heads of departments
- the product of some inflexible regulations (e.g., if in the last year you used only X dollars, you automatically get that. Whether there's actually an ROI in it or not. And a lot goes into _waste_, not R&R, because a penny saved is a penny cut next from your budget next year.)
- the result of some new boss pissing on everything to mark his territory (e.g., he'll show everyone who's boss by pointless half-baked restructuring games and budget reorganization, not because he actually studied what needs to be done with that money, but just to mark his new territory.) This goes especially well with the previous situation.
Etc.
Note that in the above I've said "many" or "a lot", but not "all". Yeah, there still are sane places. On the other hand, like Scot Adams put it recently, we seem to have harnessed the power of stupidity: at any given time, 90% of society's resources are pushed off a cliff by morons. It makes one wonder.
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Dinosaur Extermination Service (Score:2)
If they get eaten, it's by bigger dinosaurs. Meanwhile, they're crushing the tiny little herbivores under their enormous stump-like feet by the dozens.
Even if they're slow, the only things that can really take down the biggest dinosaurs are old age, starvation, and lightning.
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In many companies, IT is used to build tools to support pre-existing processes and not recommend changes to the processes. (This is generally a good thing, as it requires the business folks to provide IT with requirements and details of how they want IT to support said processes.) However, this often delegates IT to a supporting role, one that is used to provide stability and min
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I'd like to expand on this theme. At my place, lots and lots of underemployed groups of programmers keep spitting out the same products, but under new "web service" protocols. Why? PHBs and CEOs hear about how cool web services are from trade magazines, so these groups deliver products that has buzz words the CEOs want to hear. So we just don't transfer a file anymore, we use a web service instead. No new functionality, just buzz words.
When one group DOES actually
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CEO's Want Something For Nothing (Score:4, Insightful)
If they want innovation, they need to understand not all ideas pay out. It's not unlike venture capital - it takes money to make money and not everything hits paydirt.
As long as CEOs keep wanting to do this crap on the cheap, they will be dissatisfied with the results.
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How many new products fail? Look at Zune, and look at the iPod. Apple NAILED the dedicated portal media player with the iPod by giving it an excellent UI and GUI, (limited) cross-platform compatibility, and released a storefront/download/media management suite which not only adheres to quasi-open, de-facto standards such as MP3, but incorpo
It's no surprise to me (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's no surprise to me (Score:5, Insightful)
- Make the ideas work within the existing framework.
- Show how to move from the old method to the new method.
- Convince people it's to their benefit.
Many innovators lack the above skills. They think that once they've performed some "innovation" their job is over, and thus get extremely frustrated when it's subsequently (and predictably) ignored, saying things like "innovation is given lip service". Of course, to make the above work, the researcher would have to get down and dirty and actually talk to the end users to find out about the real world.Re: (Score:2)
Or to look at it from another direction, the actual creative part of the process, coming up with new ideas, works well. However when it comes to MBA types getting their head out of their arse for more than two seconds at a time, if all falls down. Somehow its supposed to be the responsibility of the person who came up with the idea to force the uptake of it through, against opposition from those same MBAs, and to receive nothing from it at the end of the process if they happen to be successful.
You want the
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"Ideas are - in some ways - the easy part."
I know plenty of people who come up with crappy ideas but who can market them effectively. In the best case scenarios, those ideas only waste the resources that were diverted to fund them. In the worst case scenarios, those ideas hurt everyone who were tricked or forced into embracing them. So yes, coming up with ideas is easy. Coming up with good ideas is hard.
"Of course, to make the above work, the researcher would have to get down and dirty and actually
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I don't expect them to do full-scale marketing, but I do expect them to do more than many of them do now, with or without the support of management. If a researcher said to his/her boss "I'll be away from my desk today talking to the users or marketing to find out what the real problems are", few bosses would object. And if they do object, then the employee should either do it without askin
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"If a researcher said to his/her boss "I'll be away from my desk today talking to the users or marketing to find out what the real problems are", few bosses would object."
Actually, virtually all would. First, most communications with the customer are done through specific channels, primarily to avoid pissing off the customer (most people would not like it if they got dozens of phone calls from random employees from a company they just bought something from), casting the product in a bad light (if you we
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"When talking to customers, naturally one goes through marketing or whoever handles the customer. But what's wrong with them saying to a customer "we want to take you out to lunch and have one of our researchers talk to you about your concerns"?"
Having marketing carefully arrange meetings between customers and research and development is one thing. An engineer suddenly announcing to their boss that they are taking the day off to go bug customers (like you suggested they do) is completely different.
"An
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And researchers who can't see beyond the technical aspects of their work make things so much harder. How many times has a researcher gotten so carried away explaining the technical details of some idea that they forget to explain why it might benefit the company or the customer? How
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Many researchers seem to think that management has or should have infinite resources, wisdom, and patience, so that they can capture every idea the researcher has, fully understand its signficance, and immediately bring it to market. Dream on.
Many criticisms of management are valid, but in the end they have limited resources like everyone else. I find researchers more guilty of not understanding their job. Many simply d
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Re:It's no surprise to me (Score:4, Interesting)
No, it will be taken and weighed against the vendors. How one presents an idea to management will likely be what is not taken seriously.
Sun, IBM, etc all have solutions and they work. They are packaged, supported, planned, installed, warranted, and documented. How do you present your stellar ideas to management? In a dusty old computer that reeks of "homebuilt", a cheesy black and white Powerpoint presentation, no plan for failure, no support structure, no redundancy, no analysis (as in a real B-school style analysis) of cost structure and other lost opportunity to compare your idea to a professional idea?
This is what I see when a brilliant idea comes out of IT. Half baked, kool-aid drinking engineers reapplying another bug ridden Linux tool convinced that their idea is the best simply because they conjured it themselves and on the face it seems cheaper.
Spend a few minutes and package your idea. Bell Labs developed ideas well because they thought them through obsessively and not because they were presented and accepted at the half-baked stage of development.
I'm not saying that half baked ideas are bad. Not at all. It's simply that a half baked idea cannot be evaluated well against a fully supported (vendor) idea. In a fear-driven shareholder environment, a well thought out plan of a good idea trumps a crappy brilliant idea every time.
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No, they aren't. If your idea isn't worth your time and investment, it sure as hell isn't worth theirs.
I know it's a lot of work. First hand.
There is nothing that says you can't go to management and say "Hey, I've got this idea, it's fully disclosed, I'd like to learn how to productize it. Is there someone who can help me go through the process so that it's exactly the way you want it? I want to create a market analysis, a 5P chart, and make a few calls to customers to s
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"No, they aren't. If your idea isn't worth your time and investment, it sure as hell isn't worth theirs."
First of all, as has been pointed out several times in this thread, I can't profit from the idea at all, only the company can. So arguing whether or not it is worth my time is just dumb. It is quite likely something that could increase the company's profits by 10% would not be worth it to me to give up my weekends for the next 6 months in an effort to pursue it, but certainly would be worth it for t
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It doesn't happen that way.
You work in *their* world, not yours. They are probably not doing everything they can to make you feel special, wanted, and valued (
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I came across the mother of all "that's just how we have always done it" stories the other day.
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contributing to the Union victory in the Civil War.
Sometimes innovation bites you in the ass.
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Goals are over rated. Some of us still value the process and the effort.
If this is truly the case, come work for me for no paycheck. We'll see how long you truly desire the effort with no reward.
While you may not be the exception to the rule, the fact stands that when the process has some type of reward (versus your no reward), we wind up having more of it. That way it doesn't matter what your intentions are, sheerly that it got done (where 'it' in this case is more innovation).
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You also have the sequence incorrect. Need is the driver of creativity which produces invention. Apes trade things for food (sex) with no invention involved. So no, at the most rudimentary level the CEO came before creativity.
Re:Shit World 2007 (Score:5, Insightful)
Card carrying member of the all-or-nothing crowd? Some of us still value shades of grey. But I can suspend that momentarily.
While we're in the process of doing a root-canal on human dignity, what is it about human nature that connects such a worthless rejoinder directly to the kneecap? A lot of people in history have worked for no paycheck, and there's a name for that, although it's hard to get creative work out of people under those conditions.
Fast forward history from the primal snarl, the dilemma arises where one profit-oriented sweatshop industrialist finds himself undercut by an even more ruthless profit-oriented sweatshop industrialist. He needs an edge. Maybe even an idea. But where to get such a thing? He certainly can't produce one himself, that might cut into his ego-maintenance time. No, his only recourse is to shackle himself a golden goose, one of those notorious flakes who has not fully and properly internalized the value that life is all about money.
Or if not money, honor. For example, if I work a machine shop and lose my hand, I get compensation. If I work for the military and I lose my life, I get a flag. The military has a similar never-ending connundrum: how to recruit without paying people commensurate to the risk and sacrifice involved. Amp up the service and loyalty and nation-under-threat rhetoric. It works for business too. Just amp up the "it's all about money", or bare a fang while leering "come work for free", and play it up as a fair rejoinder. The rhetoric "it's all about money" does not speak to money, it speaks to subordination, and primal greeds satisfied by one person controlling another. Any person who goes around reminding others of their primal needs is all about control. I once witnesses a person purporting to be an angel investor who came into the meeting room and filled an entire white-board with the two words: FEAR and GREED. That was on there the whole time he spoke, and another week afterwards. We were too intimidated to erase it.
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Re:Shit World 2007 (Score:5, Insightful)
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The goal of running a business is to make money.
No, the goal of a business is to have a fun, interesting and worthwhile life. Money is just an, albeit important, tool to that end.
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It's not piracy, it's sharing. Didn't your parents teach you to share?
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If I go out to the store and bu
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Just so. And this is what makes America great.
Or so I'm told.
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This post is the single most alien thing I've ever read on slashdot. How can you possibly not wonder about that? You even go so far as to glorify your own ignorance of the world around you?
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The problem is not with goals, it's with the market ** ducks **. The truth is if profit was not such a factor, many creative and great ideas would finally come to fruition, the problem is we don't have infinite resources. I'd like to be the first to say that: Our quest for profit distorts and also hinders our quest for progress in some areas as much as it helps in others.
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Re:Shit World 2007 (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, let me guess, you're one of those jackasses under the delusion that employment is some sort of master / slave relationship. Here's a little reality check for the aspiring Lumbergh: The master is whoever costs more to replace.
Besides, the point of money is to fuck the hottest chicks, eat the best food, and die with the most toys, so this whining is counterproductive. If the employee and the CEO aren't on the same page about getting more money, you've got bigger problems than IT costs.
Innovation Pains (Score:2)
Innovation must also solve a problem with the status quo (even if only not perfectly perceived). Big Picture Executives and Chief Lieutenants get into discussions all day about "we could do this", and later learn that it has a complex side effect. If the side effect is solved, innovate. If the side effect is worse than the original problem, then that idea has to be parked for some length of time until the atmosphere changes and it can be revisited.
Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
Fast forward to today. I'm interviewing for jobs. Every single company I interview with doesn't care what my aptitude is, or what I can do to help the business use technology to give them a great ROI on technology while solving their problems. They only care "Do you know product X?"
So, my own experience shows me that CEO's certainly don't give a crap about innovation. Or, if they do, their IT managers certainly aren't following their vision (actually, I do think that is probably the case, as I saw some evidence of that at the last company after each quarterly meeting where I'd agree with what the CEO wanted to do, but my own management would always go down the buy the canned solution that doesn't work so well path).
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Every single company I interview with doesn't care what my aptitude is, or what I can do to help the business use technology to give them a great ROI on technology while solving their problems.
Amazon cares. Sure, we want people to know java and c++, but we hire for basic smarts and aptitude, because we've internalized that today's hot! new! thing! is tomorrows awful legacy product. Projects are approved based on ROI to the company, so being able to tell your potential boss how you saved your last gig $50
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It really depends on the application and what is available in the marketplace. If you can go with off-the-shelf software and resist the urge to customize the living daylights out of it you can save a TON of cash, and ongoing support costs as well.
The same CEOs that get copyrights exended? (Score:3, Interesting)
Perhaps they should get a fucking clue?
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The copyright monkeys are in the content creation business.
The bean counters of this article are in the IT business.
Efficient innovation (Score:2)
At Boston Scientific the new mantra is efficient innovation, brought to you by people who grossly overpaid to purchase innovation (Guidant), to the ruin of all.
what an idiot (Score:2)
Andrew: Innovation is a three-step process: 1. Generate an idea. 2. Commercialize it. 3. Realize the value.
this guy is a genius.
If only I had know it was this simple before, I have wasted my career...
Well doh (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Catch as many ideas as possible
2. Usually an initial independent review "does this make sense at all?"
3. Priority process, typically in several stages
3a) Benefit estimates, cost estimates, risk etc. into a business plan
3b) More review (alone)
3c) Prioritizing (total)
4. Develop quantifiable success metrics
5. Review resource contraints and select the best project portfolio
6. Do project implementation
7. Review project underways
8. Review compared to success metrics
Innovation is risk, but risk can be managed. Companies that don't innovate die, so it's not like "not doing it" is an option. I've seen so many bad examples of poor management here, basicly things get started ad hoc based on personal initiatives with no proper review, planning, success criteria or anything. On the other hand, I've seen a few companies that have overdone it though, where the red tape is killing it too. But most companies really crap out on two things: Highly unrealistic business plans which nobody gets smacked for, and starting off projects with little to no regard on "where do we really want to go and is this project taking us in the right direction?".
not a surprise, but i want a surprise (Score:2)
RTFAd? (Score:5, Informative)
Having said all of the above, I actually RTFAd, so sue me.
The article mentions that 46% of the 2,468 senior executives surveyed worldwide said that they are satisfied with the return on their innovation spending. The rest are dissatisfied with the returns.
This has nothing to do with innovation itself, this has to do with the fact that often what is supposed to be innovation (something that is supposed to provide the company with better processes, systems, business and generate income or reduce spending) in reality does nothing of the kind. Often people push their ideas not because they want to innovate, but because they want to spend or they want to do something that is not profitable for the company but satisfies their own interests.
The article is about waste of money and it is not about CEOs who "don't like" innovations.
Move along, this is nothing else but the usual 'non-tech' CEO bashing. (Oh, I am not against bashing, but only when there is actually a good point to make. There is nothing of the kind here.)
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Heloooooo????? (Score:2)
Reality check 101: a CEO's job is to maximize profits. That's all, folks.
So anything that doesn't bring-in a fat bottom-line right now can't stand a chance.
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no innovation in large companies (Score:2)
There IS a real problem here... (Score:2, Interesting)
What this is telling us is that we have good ideas, but we're not realizing gains from them.
Well, some obvious culprits:
* Poor identification of what ideas will be the ones to generate returns. In a number of large company, the CIO is personally making these decisions, based on proposals that bubble up through several layers of management. That means the person with the idea isn't advocating it, and there are also a number of people in the process who's pr
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Maybe... (Score:2, Insightful)
wow (Score:2)
Maybe they shouldnt overhyped it that much (Score:2)
Blue Sky research is what is most lacking (Score:5, Insightful)
This is not a good thing. We need more blue sky deep research - research with NO profit motive - its where the real ground-breaking stuff happens. Keep science away from bean-counters. They will eviscerate it the same way they gutted the Arts and Humanities.
RS
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Inventing things involves taking risk, that the hole you're digging is going to come up dry. That's the way it is; if you could -guarantee- innovation you're much too valuable to be an employee because you'r
The problem is the CEOs, not innovaters... (Score:2)
It's no wonder innovation in the US is lacking, severely. I mean, seriously - how many people do you know in the US who have a job where innovation is even allowed? Not many - not many at all. Actually, not many of the people I know even work in information or research fields anymore - all their jobs have been shipped overseas and filled by H1-B visa workers who will work for nearly half
Why not invest the same as they expect (Score:2)
The average CEO makes 400 times what their "innovators" do. So, take a cut, apply those dollars toward a return, then grow their salary by percentage of new revenue from innovation, rather than cutting costs.
The goal of innovation (Score:3, Insightful)
Within the rather thin, anemic context of profit-seeking enterprises, yes.
It's been apparent for years, however, that profit-seeking behavior presents one of the greatest obstructions to innovation, whose purpose is to actually help people (and not just "enterprises") to improve their conditions and lives. From proprietary software and web services EULAs, the DMCA and abuse of its takedown notice systems, incessant pointless copyright extensions, to incompetent patent granting system, you don't have to go far to at least reasonably wonder if "the bottom line" is failing to help innovation more than innovation os failing to help generate profits.
There's a LOT more to life outside the grubbing business world, but judging by the prevalence of people making misleading statements like this, it's easy to forget.
The flip side of that coin (Score:2)
The goal of innovation is to make or save money, and IT should never lose sight of that central fact.
Even if IT doesn't, the customer can. I have one customer...a government entity...that I've worked pretty much the same way I'd treat a private side customer, with an eye toward efficiency and the bottom line. It's bought me nothing there. They spent a million dollars to take a working application developed by three people and give it to a team of 7 from another company to maintain. No fail over, they
Because .... (Score:2)
Change requires ongoing management attention.
Ongoing management attention interferes with their afternoon golf games.
99.99% of all CEOs are only in it for the money (Score:2)
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Summary: ideologies are mental
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Yes we all do things for money. Its the most efficient reward that works better than anything else. Sure some people hate their jobs or whom they work for but most mature folks will simply seek another employer. Thats life and nothing would get done otherwise. If you have a job you enj
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Consider hotel soap... (Score:2)
Imagine today, a hotel that didn't offer little bars of soap.
that's an innovation, that only COST money..
and continues to do so today...
is it a bad innovation or a necassary one?
Who enjoys appearing inept? (Score:2)
My experience says that for the vast majority of companies, business finances overwhelm every other facet of the business. And that is not at all unexpected - if you want to remain alive, you have to watch where your money goes and comes from. However, going beyond this conventional logic, I've also noticed that even well established com
Too much innovation is bad for business (Score:2)
Innovation within an existing market that your company dominates in marketshare can lead to
Innovation/Invention is always a success? (Score:2)
Innovation"
and the problem is Businesses Management (BM) of The Almighty Science/Technology Budget.
Invention is a tangible result, which was intuitively created by the actions of a genius.
Innovation is the introduction of something new [make changes] into anything established.
Leadership is about vision, prescience, experience, and the genius to create real measurable success.
BM is about tangible, meas
Maybe if the Fu****g punks would stop.. (Score:2)
Fine with us... (Score:2)
CEO == no clue (Score:2)
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Better said, it is called a Loss.
If one were a good scientist, they would tie their project in to a chance of gains for a few "buckets". One bucket could be the now-1 year, while another could be 1-5 years, while another could be 5 year-far future gains.
Risk analysis could be done to determine what strategy would maximize gains. Any bean counter would understand this kind of analysis and be very conducive to this sort of data handling.
I'd imagine tha
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