Fostering a Culture of Innovation

The Economist says that innovation has become the “industrial religion of the 20th century” and Gregory Daines of Cambridge University says that it is the new theology that unites the left and right of politics. Gary Hamel says that “radical innovation is no longer an option for big companies — it’s the imperative.” We are all probably familiar with such rhetoric on innovation in recent years. Of its importance, nobody is of doubt. Of its mastery, few companies can lay claim.

One company that has frequently been used as a case study in the literature on innovation is 3M, where one-third of its annual revenues come from sales of products that are less than four years old. In the semi-conductor industry, Moore’s Law could not have been realised over the last few decades had it not been for the relentless and innovation-driven push to come up with ever smaller, cheaper and yet more powerful microelectronic devices such as microprocessors from Intel, the company co-founded by Gordon Moore himself.

For the purpose of this article, innovation is defined as “the embodiment, combination, and/or synthesis of knowledge into new and unique combinations”1 to create value. This definition differentiates it from invention which is the discovery of things have not been discovered before.

Nature versus nurture and individuals versus teams are moot points in any discussion on creativity at the philosophical level. For an applied research and development organisation where most projects are undertaken by teams, this is an academic issue. Individual researchers would no doubt be capable of pursuing their own research interests. The real challenge is how to get a higher rate of innovation out of the research teams and how to reap greater synergy across the organisation.

If the researchers work on un-coordinated research and run in different directions, the organisation would be a very chaotic workplace. Although it is generally acknowledged that some chaos is good for creativity, too much of it will create anarchy with energy dissipated in different directions.

Applied research and development is about creating new knowledge to add value. A culture of innovation is therefore critical. As the transformation of culture involves human behaviour, human relationships and a shift of mental models, it is a challenging and long-term journey fraught with ups and downs. This article focuses on my experience with encouraging greater knowledge sharing, interdisciplinary R&D and ideation in the DSO National Laboratories,2 an organisation whose main focus is applied R&D for national security.

Sharing Knowledge

The ability of researchers to build on each other’s knowledge is an essential ingredient for new knowledge to be created while minimising reinvention of the wheel. Seeking views and perspectives from others enables a researcher to open himself up to new possibilities, enrich his own knowledge base and develop fresh perspectives.

Examples of initiatives that have been put in place in DSO to change the instinct of staff from “why share?” to “why not share?” include peer reviews, technical presentations, intranet sharing of technical reports, sharing lessons learnt from projects through case studies, translating tacit knowledge into handbooks, and establishing active technical interest groups.

I started an annual management course for middle level managers in 1998 to enable the experience gained from different projects to be shared through case studies, one of which I wrote from a project that I led many years ago. As most of these require extra effort beyond the normal project requirements, the main difficulty that has been encountered is to instil the habit of reflecting on lessons learnt from projects. My observation is that participants who have benefited from such case studies are more inclined to write case studies.

The publication of the DSO 30th Anniversary commemorative book Creating the Technology Edge in October 2002 was a watershed in DSO’s effort to open up. It was a collective effort by many management and technical staff - past and present - to put in a layman’s language some of DSO history and capabilities that can be openly talked about. In June 2003, this was followed by DSO’s first public technology showcase known as “Defence Science Matters!”.

Forging a knowledge sharing culture is particularly challenging in an organisation like DSO because of its involvement with sensitive defence projects. Striking the right balance between openness and security remains a challenge for DSO even to this day. The key to doing so is appropriate classification of information so that what is really sensitive can be properly protected.

Borrowing and adapting some jargon from the recent Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) crisis, the vision I have for knowledge sharing in DSO is to maximise innovation infection or “inno-fection” by nurturing more innovation super-spreaders. In turn, they should encourage staff who are in self-quarantine to come forth and infect others. It would be very satisfying if such efforts result in a DSO that runs a high “inno-fever”. Appropriate innovation-radar (iR) sensors for surveillance and tracking that have been put in place today include a set of indicators to track the trends in talks, handbooks, documents deposited, case studies, personal webpages and so on. A knowledge management unit known as iKM has also been formed to drive the effort.

DSO would have gone a long way in its knowledge sharing effort when its staff firmly embrace the notion that “we share, therefore we are”.

Generating Refreshing Ideas

Ideas and imagination are the seeds of innovation. Though not all the seeds will germinate and grow into innovation, without such seeds, we cannot even begin to hope for innovation. For innovation to thrive, idea generation must therefore become a habit.

An environment that is conducive for creative sparks to fly must allow even the most junior staff to explore ideas, bounce them off with his colleagues, and float promising ideas up to his bosses without being inhibited by organisational barriers or sacred cows. I decided to experiment with the formation of cross-disciplinary idea generation teams about two years ago.

So far, more than 100 of the research staff have participated in such idea generation teams. They have generated more than 100 ideas, about 5% of which have been shortlisted for further studies. The rest are stored in an ideas e-bank.

No organisation can claim to have a monopoly on ideas. Networking with the outside world has helped us to broaden our perspectives and enrich our ideas. Today for example, DSO researchers work very closely with the officers from the Future System Directorate of MINDEF to dream up new ideas and concepts that could con-tribute to the SAF transformational effort. Research collaborations with R&D partners from other companies also provide useful references on what others are doing in related areas.

Ideas generated and technologies created need to be shared across the organisation. I have therefore asked for an innovation fair to be organised once in two years for researchers to share their latest ideas, technologies and gadgets.

One of the challenges here is to create sufficient momentum for the idea generation movement to take on a life of its own and for the habit of idea generation to be internalised, notwithstanding the competition for time from other tasks perceived to be more urgent by staff.

My vision for DSO is for it to be a wellspring of technological knowledge, a fountain of innovation, and an inspiration to the R&D community in Singapore.

Undertaking Inter-Disciplinary R&D

Another challenge is encouraging interdisciplinary research. In general, most researchers are highly specialised - very knowledgeable in their area of specialisation but ill at ease venturing beyond their own area of specialisation or discipline. In the May 2003 issue of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine,3 Dr Allan Steinhardt of DARPA came up with his “Steinhardt’s Asymptotic Law of Speciation”4 which states that :

lim P (salience) -> 0
Speciation -> infinity

The law states that, as disciplines in engineering become more and more specialized and insular, the probability that a salient5 solution will arrive from research activities becomes extremely slim. The point is that a balance is needed between depth and breadth. Over-specialization could result in the search for solutions to practical problems within a confined solution space while being blind to alternative approaches that could be more practical, robust or effective.

To maximise the ability of our researchers to come up with novel, inspiring, cool and elegant (NICE) solutions, the specialists from different disciplines need to dream and work together. At the organisation level, I have assigned two of the DSO directors the de facto roles of CIOs - not chief information officers but chief integration officers - to help to facilitate inter-disciplinary R&D.

System concept studies (SCS) by researchers from across centres are also encouraged. A particular SCS could for example be made up of team members who are specialists in radar, electromagnetics, electro-optics, acoustics, materials and aerodynamics to study the concept of a low observable aircraft. Another team could be made up of engineers, microbiologists and chemists to develop a field deployable chemistry-biological sensor on a chip.

During the recent SARS crisis, DSO operations researchers applied mathematical tools they had developed for critical infrastructure security assessment to model the spread of the disease in Singapore. Computer scientists who work on defences against computer viruses also chipped in to apply their skills to model the spread of the virus. The experience is now being applied back to their work on computer security. Our chemists apply their chemical defence expertise to help fight this biological threat. Diversity can certainly enrich the elegance of our solutions, much as spices enrich the taste of our food, provided we are able to converge and blend them well.

Between individualism and teaming, the latter is less instinctive than the former. Nevertheless, in encouraging teaming and interdisciplinary innovation, one of the key challenges is to ensure that creative individuals are not stifled. Like in team sports, world-class teams that excel and sparkle owe their success as much to outstanding teamwork as to the flair of the individual players.

Setting Stretched Goals

During the dot-com fever period of the late 90s, we came across stories of new start-ups almost on a daily basis. Success stories spoke of how small groups of individuals would work extremely hard to pursue their dream ideas to a stage when their start-ups would be ready for initial public offering (IPO). The IPO was the pot of gold every start-up was chasing. This prompted to me to think about whether it would be possible to introduce some mechanisms to motivate small groups of staff to go the extra mile to push performance boundaries of their R&D work to the limit, as if they were working for their own start-up companies. Stock options and IPO were clearly not applicable for a not-for-profit, government-owned R&D company like DSO. I formed a task force to study the issue.

What the task force recommended was to put in place a mechanism whereby staff were encouraged to set stretched goals. The goals must be beyond what is feasible at the time they are proposed. If successful, the outcome should be impactful to be worth the risks.

To incentivise staff, a monetary award is given to teams that are able to achieve the registered goals. I also took the opportunity to revise the overall DSO reward and recognition system for team achievements to stimulate group innovation. The apex of the reward was what I dubbed the DSO KINETIC6 Award for teams that achieve outstanding capabilities with significant operational impact. The quantum depends on its impact. The highest reward given for a KINETIC Award to date is $100,000.

When President Kennedy said the following on September 12, 1962, he was actually setting a stretched goal for the Americans:

“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organise and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.”

At the time when it was set, there were many reasons to be skeptical and the goal seemed impossible to many. Yet it challenged the entire nation and America succeeded in putting a man on the moon in 1969. While the scale of organisational projects cannot be compared to that of the moonshot, the principle of setting ambitious goals to inspire staff to excel and create is equally applicable. My experience with the stretched goals initiative bears this out. It also bears out the truth of what Gary Hamel said, “No company outperforms its aspirations... Beliefs set the upper limit on what is possible.”7

Researchers have to register their goals up-front after convincing a panel that the goals are indeed stretched. While hard work may work, in most cases smart work would be necessary. As researchers invariably have to tap on their creative juices in reaching for stretched goals, the journey itself can be as important and instructive as the destination. Since 2001, about 30 projects with stretched goals have been registered. One-third of these are still on-going. One third did not meet their goals and have been terminated. The remaining one-third have achieved their goals. The failure rate is therefore 50%. But in most cases, those who have taken up the challenges have found them rewarding, irrespective of whether they attained fully the goals set.

One of the main challenges here is to encourage staff to pluck up the courage to set stretched goals for their projects. The notion that failure is a stepping stone to success has yet to be widely embraced.

Sharpening Customer-Focus

As researchers allow their imagination to soar and aim for the stars in their aspirations, they must also keep their feet on the ground to ensure that they remain relevant. Keeping in touch with the potential users of their R&D outputs is a very useful reality check. It also ensures that they focus their energy on solving real problems that matter rather than chasing blue-sky research to satisfy their intellectual curiosity or simply to publish papers.

In solutioning, it is one thing to hypothesize based on simplistic assumptions but quite another to ensure that our solutions are robust enough to perform well against real data, under typically noisy and realistic field environment. In signal processing for example, where signal-to-nose ratio is widely used as a measure of the quality of signals to be processed, it is sometimes said that theoreticians design their algorithms to handle signals while real engineers design their algorithm to handle noise!

The challenge for the researchers is to strike a good balance between demand pull and technology push in their quest for NICE solutions to practical problems. Customer focus must however not be at the expense of the researchers’ ability to generate bold ideas and concepts to capitalise on technological opportunities and meet unarticulated needs.

Growing and Glowing

Innovation leverages on human ingenuity. It is therefore not something that can be mechanised or automated. The real competitive edge of organisations that strive to be innovative ultimately lies in their people and how they are employed. An environment that is conducive for creative sparks to be ignited and where talented people can work on challenging projects is a powerful magnet that attracts other talent.

There must therefore also be an appropriate human resource management system put in place to enable the knowledge creators to grow and glow. In the DSO context, the initiatives that have been put in place include an employment scheme optimised for R&D work, the streamlined reward and recognition system mentioned above, a technical career advancement ladder, and establishment of an intellectual property management system. To further inspire staff, a unique sculpture known as “Tropical Brainforest” was unveiled as a tribute to the DSO knowledge creators in January 2003.

Conclusion

Fostering a more innovative culture is a journey that takes years. Even then, you are never really quite there because the destination itself is also dynamic as one adapts to new reality and new challenges along the way. No doubt the trans-formation journey of the SAF will face similar challenges.

One of the key measures of success is the ability to convert potential creative energy into kinetic energy and continuously expand the intellectual space as it is the wellspring of the convertible energy.

If there is a single lesson I have learnt so far that is generally applicable, it is that there is no point just simply dreaming or talking about innovation or lamenting about the lack of it - just do it! The whats and hows of doing it is itself a great and exciting challenge in innovativeness and adaptiveness.

Endnotes

1 Definition adopted by the American Productivity & Quality Centre (APQC).

2 The mission of DSO is to develop technologies and solutions that can provide technological surprises to sharpen the cutting edge of Singapore’s national security.

3 Alan Steinhardt, “Making New Stuff Work”, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, May 2003, p14-18.

4 “Speciation” has its origins in biology. Steinhardt uses it to describe the urge to become increasingly specialized.

5 Salience here means that the essence of a practical need has been captured in the mathematical formula of a problem to such an extent that a practical solution is offered once the theoretical problem is solved.

6 KINETIC is the acronym of the DSO value system that I introduced in 1998. It stands for Knowledge creation, seeking and sharing, INtegrity, Excellence, Teamwork, Innovativeness, and Customer-focus.

7 Gary Hamel, Leading the Revolution, p244-245