Let innovators get on with it

Ian Pearson, employed by BT to predict the future (see Eureka September 2002), also has strong ideas on how we should get there, and hopefully make some money on the way. On organising innovation, he tells us: "People problems become impossible if you try to over centralise. The solution is to de-centralise, encourage local self organisation and try to emulate Silicon Valley. In the UK, we cultivate individual arrogance – everyone thinks they can do it better which is why we are so innovative. This means that there will always be a certain amount of duplication of work and some overlap. I am not entirely sure that this is a problem. Several times the different approaches will use different tool sets. It should be desirable to allow all the approaches to proceed until there is a clear winner. A scattergun is appropriate in the early stages." On asking how these different approaches should be evaluated and managed in order to be made commercial, he said, "Micromanagement is slowing down British innovation. Control of every single thing is very restrictive. For example, an accountant might ban coffee breaks and then destroy the informal meetings where most inventions are actually conceived." We asked if duplication of effort might be reduced and efficiency improved by using central databases and repositories of information. Pearson replied: "It is always better to talk to people and get that spark. If you look at successful innovative startup firms, they foster opportunities for staff to meet each other. Most successful teams are those that have a lot of get togethers." Terry Wood, business manager for BT Retail, who was also sitting in on the meeting added: "Commercialisation decisions are a trade-off between benefits for ourselves and for the competition. In order to decide what to do, we simply look at what model will make us the most money. Our general opinion is that it often takes another company to develop an idea and commercialise it." At this point, Pearson added: "Innovators who have the ideas and developers are not usually the same people. We are starting to see the world- wide standardisation of business processes. Standard business process software products are likely to be increasingly available off the shelf. This is a good thing, enabling companies to get going faster, especially as regards e-commerce and e-business. Beaurocracy should hopefully take up and less and less of one’s time. Administration, which still takes up too much time, should become less invasive and less time wasting. Presently, we are engaged in solving the short term problems of getting there." Wood then said that if they could put a voice interface into their business products, it would be a "great help". Pearson interjected: "To fill in business forms, we would only need a small vocabulary so it should work." This led to general enthusiasm from the BT staff around the table and Eureka got the impression that an idea for a range of products had just been born, proving the just postulated efficacy of open-ended meetings, and that these products were likely to be on sale soon. The firm already has a Mobile SMS-to-speech capability obtained by converting a PC based text-to-speech engine so it can run on a PDA. It also has a Business Voice Portal which mobile workers can contact by speaking commands or using a telephone keypad. The portal will then read out e-mails, appointments and other useful information. Watch this space for developments. TS