Fueling Innovation in the Workplace

I came into this role after more than three decades of experience in engineering & technology sector, where I got the opportunity to work both in India and overseas in countries like Japan. Having previously worked in a similar profile, I bring with me a blend of technical and practical-based experience. That background has helped me understand how to build strong & talented business-enabling technology teams.

Since arriving in July, I have been learning about our business and priority areas for our engineering centre. We have a great set of people with a huge knowledge base and a lot has been accomplished in a short period of time.

For 2019, our priority is to focus on ‘engineering execution excellence’ and enabling competitive advantage through innovation. We will also be focusing our efforts towards embracing digital technologies and looking at how technology can change  the way we innovate.

As a matter of fact, I am very energized and optimistic about our highly-skilled colleagues and their expertise and passion. I want to make sure we make the right decisions, and secure the team’s commitment for the exciting future that lies ahead.

Innovation is at the heart of Rolls-Royce. Throughout its history, Rolls-Royce pursued ever cleaner, safer and more competitive solutions to our power needs – developing ground-breaking technologies and providing the world’s most powerful and efficient aero-engines. We envision technology acquisition and innovation ahead of customer need, over 20 year horizons. The transition to a low carbon global economy is spurring us to develop new technologies and capabilities. For example, each year we spend over £1.3bn on gross research and development to develop the technology we embed in our products and services. This ongoing commitment to innovation is essential to meeting customer and society’s needs for sustainable power.

At Rolls-Royce, we have various stimulants to innovation and creativity. I fundamentally believe in the concept of ‘innovation = meaningful uniqueness’. This means, we carefully choose the problems for which by providing innovative solutions we impact the customers and our business in a meaningful and unique way. I believe that identifying the right problem / opportunity is an essential first step to innovation. Having such a simplistic mindset to innovation enables us to create offerings which are meaningful to our customers and to our business.

There are multiple ways we encourage innovation at our workplace:

First and foremost, in order to move faster and solve or address this problem / opportunity, we build diverse workforce - having employees with different perspectives, backgrounds and problem-solving approaches to come up with unique ideas.

To fructify these ideas, we need a culture of boldness or lack of fear of failure. Together with our leaders, we foster an environment where ideas are shared openly and teams are encouraged to take intelligent risks, fail fast, and learn quickly from mistakes.

Underlining the importance of collaboration within teams by sharing information and building a high level of transparency is another way we foster an innovative mindset. For instance, our partnership with Tata Consultancy Services to set up R² Data Lab is a great example of how our teams are collaborating to accelerate data innovation across businesses.

Lastly, by providing regular opportunities for learning and training to employees, we inspire new thoughts and approaches to the problems. When teams gain additional experience, they feel motivated and inspired to contribute towards the success of business.

The bottom-line is that through a combination of multiple stimulations - collaborative and fail-fast culture, diverse set of ideas, understanding of the right problems to solve and giving people the correct direction, companies can encourage meaningful innovation. In this manner, you create the first level of acceptance to move forward in line with the evolving customer demands.

In today’s environment, there are numerous challenges that prevent organisations from fostering innovation at workplace.

Firstly, innovation should be considered as part of regular work, and not an add-on work, for it to sustain in a business context. Both should complement each other to be impactful. For this to happen, people should keep challenging status-quo and come up with unique solutions. At the same time, ensuring effectiveness in delivering the committed project or programme becomes critical as current commitments have direct impact on customers and business. Overall, balancing these two aspects becomes challenging for companies leading to innovation taking a backseat.

Secondly, while we said diversity enables innovation, developing a culture that is open to appreciating a problem or a solution coming from different groups is not easy. On the other hand, cost of not collaborating and not bringing in diversity is significantly high. It is not just an impediment to innovation; it is also a big drag in terms of investment. 

To add to this, very often, innovation is considered to be only technology driven. When seen from the customer’s perspective, for companies to continuously offer innovative solutions, it is essential to create a culture of sustained innovation covering both processes and people in addition to just technology. Building this kind of a holistic innovation mindset & ecosystem remains a challenge amongst most organisations.

Also, when teams don’t have a clear understanding of the evolving business landscape and changing customer demands, they miss out on future trends and the problems that needs addressing. This creates major setbacks for the organisations, as the innovation drive is not likely to impact the customer in a ‘meaningful’ way while it could be ‘unique’ from technology perspective.

Other than the above, one of the most significant obstacles to workplace innovation is when leaders fail to walk the talk. This disrupts the whole culture of innovation at workplace as teams and managers don’t share a common understanding of innovation and therefore lack commitment to making it happen. Leaders should be on the ground and leading by example.