Innoboard

“Corporate innovation is a cloud of confusion.”

Paul Tran, Director, Enterprise Sales & Global Partnerships at Brightidea, Inc.

Innoboard: There is no consistent definition for innovation. Every industry and every department perceive it differently. How do you define innovation at Brightidea?

Paul Tran: We define innovation as simply “doing something new that creates value”. Corporate innovation is a cloud of confusion (see illustration). This makes it difficult for organizations to know where to start. Couple that with the fact that dedicated corporate innovation teams typically are very small with limited budget but have huge mandates. They need tools that enable them to accomplish a lot with limited resources. At Brightidea we focus on providing a “Structured Innovation Process that delivers Measurable Outcomes”. This philosophy extends to everything we do.  Which is why we develop and market a platform that is specifically designed to take ideas to reality through a very structured process. Collection of ideas is the easy part….executing on those ideas is hard work.

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“We are also a software company and not only a product company”

Uwe Rückl, Head of Research and Development, Computed Tomography, Siemens Healthineers

There is no consistent definition of innovation. Every industry and every department perceive it differently. How would you define innovation with respect to your position as Head of R&D at Siemens Healthineers?

Innovations should enable your customers do their tasks more easier, cost efficient or just enable them to do what they could not do before. This is why we at Siemens Healthineers want to support healthcare providers, our customers, to deliver better outcomes at lower costs.

A classical general definition of innovation includes the combination of technology and business. In this regard, innovation can comprise push effects in terms of new technology, but also pull effects with coming from markets and competitors. Concerning push effects, it is important to have a good overview of the latest technology and the developments in different technology fields and asks the question what customer pain points you can solve with new technologies. There is not an optimal mix of push-pull factors for all companies. For us at the moment, I would expect that many innovations are based on some 70% push and some 30% pull factors. What is important for us is to minimize time to feedback e.g. having pilot customers in every region that helps us to understand their business even better as well as getting fast and reliable feedback on new approaches. An example of a technology push is our cinematic rendering technology which is illustrated in the following video:

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“It is no longer about digitization of the banking business, but about banking in a digitized world.”

Mirjam Puetz, Head of Disruptive & Strategic Programs at the Deutsche Bank

Innoboard: There is no consistent definition of innovation. Every industry and every department perceive it differently. How do you define innovation?

Mirjam Puetz: For me personally, innovation is more than the development of new products and services, it is the lifeblood of all our efforts and has been a major driver of human development over the millennia. It is the materialisation of a creative spark, conceived in the most complex of all machines we know of today, our brain, and turned into reality by the efforts of multiple individuals that join forces to create something bigger than themselves. In this respect, innovation is not just something new and “disruptive”, it is the instantiation of the creative genius we all carry within us.

In banking, however, our focus in the last few decades has been on efficiency, creating more and more standardisation and a lack of creativity to build a new banking world. From our customers’ perspective, innovation is also a lifestyle, an attitude of constant questioning and improving of the status quo, a never-ending quest to change a product, a service or a whole society for the better. In this respect, the banking industry has embarked on a new journey, meeting and surpassing our customers’ expectations, improving our own innovation capabilities and the speed with which we are implementing changes in our own organisation and our offerings.
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“We aim to set trends in the housing industry.”

Jan Timmermann, Head of New Business at Vonovia SE

Innoboard: There is no consistent definition of innovation. Every industry and every department perceive it differently. How would you define innovation with respect to your position as Head of New Business at Vonovia? 

Jan Timmermann: Innovation is one of our top priorities. We aim to ‘set trends in the housing industry’. Despite the fact that the housing sector is generally seen as being somewhat resistant to innovation, we always keep our eye on the future because our tenants certainly will do the same. For me, innovation is about incorporating advancements, which are shaped to a considerable degree by other sectors, into our product – housing. This approach has been working pretty well so far. In my view, however, innovation is also about thinking outside the box and thinking about how we can adapt established concepts to optimally fit with our current situation, just like we have done with modular construction. 

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“Corporates need to understand why they need to work with startups before they embark doing so.”

Dr. Evangelos Simoudis, Co-Founder and Managing Director at Synapse Partners

Innoboard: You worked both with big companies as well as startups for many years. In your opinion, how differs the understanding of innovation between these two kinds of organizations?

Dr. Evangelos Simoudis: For startups technology and business model innovation is a matter of survival. If startups fail to innovate and disrupt incumbents, or innovate and in the process create a new market, then they fail which often means going out of business. Large corporations primarily try to innovate in order to extend their existing successful business models. A small percent of the corporations appreciate the advantages of over the horizon innovation and use it in an effort to create new revenue streams. The results of these over-the-horizon innovation efforts may even lead to the disruption of their existing business models.

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