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CIPD 2011: ‘Do as Steve Jobs did – foster innovation’
Published on 10th November 2011 by Amy Morris
Manage talent if you want to retain the commitment of innovative staff, delegates hear
Business people should never be too afraid or too complacent to innovate, Oracle’s Vance Kearney told conference delegates at Wednesday's keynote panel discussion on creating cultures of innovation.
“Firms not investing in R&D fall by the wayside,” warned Kearney, the company’s vice-president for HR, EMEA. “And it’s hard to innovate in a climate of uncertainty and fear.”
Kearney cited the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs as a prime example to follow. “Innovation looks like unreasonable behaviour, like an excess of ambition, a lack of patience and a sense of urgency,” he said. “But most of all it looks like strong leadership and strong vision – that is what unites people in organisations.”
Managing talent had become the “prime managerial responsibility”, Kearney added, as it “doesn’t take long to lose the energy and commitment” of innovative staff.
Fellow panellist Heather Corby, HR director for BT Innovate and Design, said the UK was “not necessarily seen as a centre of innovation, but there is an enormous amount of knowledge, potential and talent not yet leveraged.”
BT – which has spent £5 billion on R&D in the past five years – also based scouting teams in Silicon Valley, said Corby, to investigate new technologies and how they could be used to boost BT’s bottom line – through business partnering or acquisition.
But she explained that BT wanted its entire workforce to be considering innovative concepts, and had launched a competition in which winning ideas from employees were taken through to a successful launch.
She said the advent of social media was having an impact on how companies built their employer reputations and the way people innovated and communicated, and “traditional working avenues are radically changing”.
Samantha Austin-May, head of HR operations and development at the European Southern Observatory, said it was important to “challenge the status quo” to drive the technological advances of 10 years’ time.
Viewing untested ideas as experimentation – rather than projects with a risk of failure – needed to be “culturally accepted”, agreed Jane Marsh, HR director of IBM UK and Ireland, who completed the speaker line-up.
Sourced from People Management, 10 November 2011