How a company can create a cultural environment where employees have opportunities to develop innovative ideas. An article by Claudia Nemat, Member of the Deutsche Telekom AG Board of Management, Technology and Innovation.
Companies seek success through innovation. In these efforts, the digital transformation tops the agenda. At the same time, a women's quota is being implemented. There is no way forward without a cultural change that will enable a new leadership culture to gain traction. It sounds like a lot of buzzwords, but digital transformation and cultural change are no fandango. They are only rarely explained and put into a meaningful context with innovation, however.
Why is that? Can we not plan innovation, or call it up on demand? All I can say to that is, I wish! Sadly, innovation isn't as simple as that. However, the formula for success has three key ingredients.
- Innovation has to be cultivated. Grass doesn't grow any faster when you pull on it. Ideas aren't developed under pressure. What would be much more productive would be to combine the innovative strength of our employees with clear communication on the part of the management team as to what we want to stand for.
- It is essential to establish a culture that encourages and empowers employees to produce innovation, for example, by giving people the time, space and funding they need to try things out. And by establishing structures that not only celebrate success, but also analyze failures – with the aim of learning from them. Why don't we organize "fuck-up days," where employees and managers talk about their failures in both big and small projects? We mustn't punish failure, because rapid failures are part of success through innovation.
- Another important ingredient is diversity. A study by the Technical University of Munich found that diversity promotes innovation. In this context, diversity refers to 1. Different career paths, 2. Different expertise and 3. Different geographical origins, combined with a good mixture of men and women. Is it any wonder when a video game producer fails to make a successful game for the Asian market if only white, American, middle-class men were involved in its development?
Granted, we at Deutsche Telekom are not quite at a point yet where we can claim to be a positive example, but we've already taken a few steps in the right direction. UBQATE is a program that promotes employees who develop new business models. Or there's Pan-Net, our cross-border European network that enables us to bring our products and services onto the different markets more quickly. We want to use this to cement our spot as a technology pioneer in Europe. It will be successful because employees from all the European NatCos are involved.
I also made a conscious effort when choosing my management team to make sure it reflected diversity. The head of IT has experience in the banking sector. In addition to engineers, we have mathematicians, a physicist, a psychologist and a poet on board. The colleagues come from Germany, Austria, Croatia and Asia, as well as from the United States, with Lebanese roots into the bargain.
These are merely examples of how a company can create a cultural environment where employees have opportunities to develop innovative ideas. Obviously there is no need to call into question or reinvent established business processes every day, and in some cases failure is not an option. When we're facing a cyberattack, we can't just meet in the canteen and brainstorm over a coffee. But the management must recognize that the future survival of the company is highly dependent on our ability to innovate. Take Deutsche Telekom: How can we, a conventional infrastructure provider, develop future-oriented business models based on unstoppable technology trends like artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, VR and 3D printing? We have to seize every opportunity that presents itself; we need to give our employees enough leeway to explore them, but we also need to establish a culture in which employees have the ability to work on innovative ideas. And we are working flat out to see just what that might look like in reality.
