Bin's Blog

Innovation is at the core of any technology company. It is not that shiny new idea that fades quickly, it is the engine that drives the company to continuously outperform itself and sustain its success. However innovation is always somewhat considered given and easy for small startups, but “mission impossible” for large established cooperation. It is true the risk cost of failing for large cooperation is probably higher than small startups, compounded with the investment choices on short-term financial gains over longer-term prospects. However on the flip side, if large cooperation stops trying to innovate, sooner or later, it will be replaced on the market. The question is then, how? (always…)

About 10 years ago, I was assigned to lead a technology center in the company. At the time, the organization has went through a growth phase for a few years and has established its credibility in the company via strong delivery performance. However there has not been a lot of willingness to invest in creating new products, the primary portfolio in the organization are the products that have been built by other part of the company, and the center took them over and keep adding new features or sustaining them to meet the existing customer demands. This bothers me quite a bit as I have a strong belief that the center can offer a lot more to the company than that. There are lots of extremely talented software professionals in the center, a great leadership team with excellent diversity, and more importantly lots of willing minds to create bigger impact to the company. So together with the people in the center, we embarked on a 2-year journey to lead the center into its next chapter – innovation center of excellence for the company. 10 years later, we can firmly and proudly say we have succeeded in our mission. Not only the center now is the leading force of creating mission critical products for one of the top level business group in the company and creating blueprints for many other technology centers in the company, but also a fleet of very innovative talents were grown to take on the critical leadership roles (many are leading innovation organizations) in the company in different locations. How did we do it?

Start from a vision and get support

It is vital for teams to understand where we are going and why, and more importantly for them to own that vision.

We have spent the first two months interviewing and brainstorming with the people in the center (at different level), essentially asking 3 key questions: 1) what does innovation mean to us? 2) How are we doing so far (what went well and what make it go well? what went not so well and what make it not go so well)? 3) what are the three things need to happen in order to make our environment sustainably innovative?

In this process, the vision of being the innovation center of excellence sustainably is getting crystalized, people are contributing to the clarity of the picture and see themselves in it. Also we got a good sense of where we were – actually the center has a great foundation to launch into the next phase thanks to all the previous leaders whom have built pieces of the puzzles during their tenues to prepare the center. Last but not the least, ideas were sparked and themes have emerged that helps to create plans of how to get there.

Apart from getting support from the people in the center, since we are in the larger ecosystem of the company, it is curial to get the support from the upper management as well. We were lucky as the upper management at the time gave full autonomy to run the center and the center is also a full cross-function organization (business, engineering, finance, HR, facility,..), where we have all what we need to succeed.

Ground the effort and develop action plans

Once the vision is crystal clear and understood, the next question is how do we get there. The key here is to ground the effort – it means to engage people at every level all the time. Because we did this with the interviews and brainstorms, there has been a great sense of ownership already built among the people after the initial phase. So many mind-blowing ideas coming out of the effort! There is a tendency to eliminate ideas too early so do not do that. Get as many ideas as possible and from as many people as you can and write all of them down.

After that, we have formed focused groups to look at the themes (four) emerged out of all those ideas, prioritize and nail down THE top idea that we believe that will create the biggest impact in each theme. The teams then went on further to look into what concrete initiatives can be taken to realize that idea.

This phase was fun as engineers love to talk about actions 😂 We got so many extremely innovative and fun initiatives to drive the idea to realization, many of which becomes the blueprints for other part of the company later for the years to come.

Run programs and experiments, iterate

Most of the initiatives came out of the action plan phase are in the form of programs, to name a few, learning domain knowledge in the form of Bingo game, create bookmark with “generative language” so people gets educated and reminded all the time, coding world cup (yes, that was the year when world up was going on), recognition wall… We leveraged the same focused group (with their full autonomy to “recruit” other people) to drive the implementation of those programs. We do sync up on regular bases to see what works that needs to be “accelerated” and what did not work that needs to be stopped. At the end of that year, we looked back and we have accomplished a lot!

Establish patterns and platforms, keep the ship sailing

Entering second year on the journey, we did a retrospective workshop. A few things came out of the workshop. Firstly we have decided to “industrialized” a few programs we experimented and it becomes a “template” for running other initiatives. For example, Bingo game for business knowledge learning, yearly coding league, etc. Secondly, we identify the needs of “rationalizing” the large stream of ideas and provide a structure and platform to support the incubation of those ideas (or elimination of those ideas), so we have established a light and fun process (egg-eaglet-eagle, with expertise provided) and created a platform to support the process (this platform was replicated by many other technology centers in the company later). Thirdly, we have made some adjustments for the themes to focus the effort to maximize value based on the feedbacks from previous year.

Lastly, a touch on people always

Apart from the initiatives and programs we were running, one key aspect is again, people. We have established a dynamic group of people, combined with senior and junior members in the center, management or technical, who are seeds to continue pollinate the innovation spirit, we call them I2 (Innovation Influencer – did not realize influencer was such a popular term at that time). It is this group of people, whom have sharpened their influence and leadership skills, whom have grasp the key essence of innovation, advanced extremely well their career in the company to take on much bigger responsibility in the company everywhere, many of which are pushing the frontier of innovation in the company.

I was transferred to take on other role after a bit more than two years in the center, and the innovation spirits and activities continued, a few leaders came after me keep beating the drums (great work!) but the force of pushing forward is in the center and it is the same force who has created it, not me nor any other leader. This is truly sustainable!