Preserving capacity, General Tom Lawson, Chief of the Defence Staff, Keys to Canadian SAR
Issue link: http://vanguardcanada.uberflip.com/i/304887
e eXeCUtIVe InteRVIeW www.vanguardcanada.com APRIL/MAY 2014 33 OF INNOVATION risks; they feel supported when they try new things and they don't work out. True innovation is challenging by nature. Culture isn't something you just decide to change, it has to grow and evolve over time. William McKnight was a very forward thinker about how to create a culture of innovation, but it didn't happen overnight. We are very conscious of that winning strat- egy as a company and that we have to maintain that culture. If we fi nd ourselves becoming in some instances overly structured, that squashes creativity and people's passion. That being said, you have to be accountable and you have to be responsible at the same time, so it is a real balancing act to be able to say we want to foster creativity and innovation and at the same time be responsible and accountable to our shareholders. Q Are there some key factors other organizations could adopt to fi nd that balance? Part of what allows us to collaborate well as a company internally is having a multi-disciplinary approach to problems. Typically we might have a chemist, an engineer, a marketing resource and a manufacturing person all working together to solve a problem. That multidiscipline approach ends up making our solutions both creative and practical. Cultural change is a slow moving glacier. It takes a long time to get there, but that doesn't stop it from happening one person or one team at a time. That is truly about identifying the innova- tors within your organization and connecting them with the right people. Having a truly innovative person matched with a get-it- done person works well and too much of one or the other often leads to failure. You need that balanced approach. Q You mentioned change that isn't obvious. Where do you fi nd the "unobvious"? That is another element of our culture that was also instilled some time ago – something we call 3M's 15 percent time policy. It allows our researchers 15 percent of their time to do whatever it is that intrigues them. I'll be walking through one of our laboratories and stop to chat with a researcher about what they are working on and, if they tell me it's their 15 percent project, I'll turn and walk away. Those projects need to be given time, since they are often where the truly innovative stuff comes from. There is typically some end- game in mind when they are doing the work – it's not play – but it is usually in a space that has not been prescribed by management. Q How do you then get that from the shop fl oor to the C-suite? There are two answers. One, it is dangerous to try and move those ideas up too soon. They have to have some time to incu- bate; researchers need time to fl esh them out before we start talk- ing about them openly. That's one of the reasons I turn and walk away; I don't want to know too early in their thought process. If we elevate them too soon, they get killed. The other piece is that those projects don't always fi t into an organization at the onset. Sometimes it has to sit on a back burner and simmer for a time. And later we might come back and say, we were working on something 10 years ago that might be perfect to solve this problem. And that is when you bring it to the forefront, make it visible and build it into a program. The best examples in our company, like the Post-It and Scotchgard, there was a lot of serendipity that went into those. Persistence and stubbornness also helped make those ideas a reality. People just wouldn't take no for an answer and continued to work away at them. They were told no, went underground and kept at it. That might not be inherent behaviour in a military organization. Q Is there a risk of losing ideas? Do you have a method to ensure good ideas don't disappear when people move on? For intellectual property reasons, we do have a rigorous process for capturing ideas including capturing the data that supports those ideas, in order to support patent fi lings in the future. Most folks in the research area would be capturing anything they invent through that system. But those ideas, because they are at a very early stage, typically aren't on any project plan. We allow them just to incubate until we can say, this is ready for prime time. And then we will build a project plan around it. Generally it is very free fl owing at that stage. Once you start structuring things, the creative element tends to go sideways. Q Many innovations at some point involve the integration of other ideas or technologies: How do you select your partners? In many cases we will work with an OEM (original equipment manufacturer) and provide them some innovative technology that they can use to make a product better. But we also do a lot of work with small and medium sized companies. We have several different models by which we work with them. For example, we have a group called 3M New Ventures that makes venture invest- ments in SMEs to help fund their growth and at the same time provide them with technology that is going to help their products or services. This model allows us to offset risk, and improve the level of certainty about the return you'll get on your investment. Working with SMEs can be risky because they are small and may not be around in 10 years – those things are always going to be a barrier to collaboration. But at the same time, if they are work- ing in a space that is important to our customers or to economic trends, then the risk goes down. But we need to be very selective about who we chose to work with. Q How well does that translate to a public sector organiza- tion that has even more di culty with managing risk? Can you apply those 3M principles to an organization like National Defence? It is certainly a different dynamic than it is for a publicly held company. But we have an accountability to the shareholders that is not dissimilar to what the government has to taxpayers. The other piece of the puzzle is that we always have a commercial end-game in mind when we do our work which doesn't always