“Everyone Can Be an Innovator”

Innovation takes place at the deep level where the innovator’s understanding of a problem, knowledge of its market, and his or her own capabilities intersect, said Nick Donofrio, executive vice president emeritus of innovation and technology at IBM.

“Everyone can see the same thing you see, but you see it differently,” Donofrio said during the Innovation Workshop Series, sponsored by the Polsky Center for Enterpreneurship and the University of Chicago Office of Technology and Intellectual Property, at Harper Center on April 15. “If you’re really going to be innovative, you have to be looking for that hidden value that you can create by unlocking it and then capturing it.”

Innovation is not invention, creation, discovery, or technology, he said. “Think of innovation as more than just a product or service,” Donofrio said. “Think of it as a business model or management system. Think of it in the large. Don’t think of it as the right of only engineers or scientists. It could come from the sales, marketing, communications, or financial people.”

Innovation originates from those who are most engaged in the problem in question and therefore closest to where the process occurs, he said. “You just don’t know who has the piece of the puzzle that is going to make the biggest difference,” Donofrio said. For this reason, the environment in which innovation occurs must be collaborative, he said. Employees can make a bigger difference in their jobs if they collaborate, think openly, and are multi-disciplined, Donofrio said.

“Everyone can be an innovator,” he said. “This is very liberating for everybody, including large organizations. This is what I had to do to get IBM – some 200,000 engineers, scientists, and mathematicians around the world – convinced that we could be innovators. It requires the right framework, mindset, leadership, approach, and culture.”

IBM developed the Blue Jean computer, which became the world’s fastest supercomputer, from the world’s “slowest technology,” Donofrio said. “We were able to do that because we understood the problem better,” he said. “We took apart the computer to determine where all the electrons go on a regular day, in a regular minute, in a regular second, and rearranged them. It still does what a regular computer does; it just does it differently.”

IBM’s new business strategy, “Smarter Planet,” requires “three big ideas,” Donofrio said:

• Instrumenting the world’s systems. The world now makes more transistors each year than it harvests grains of rice, he said. “Everything will and can become instrumented.”
• Interconnecting the world’s instruments. “The world’s trillion devices are going to be all around us – in and on things,” Donofrio said. “They’re going to become part of our life.”
• Making those instruments more intelligent. “Collecting and selling data is a stupid idea,” he said. “We should be figuring out how to convert that data into intelligence at the moment of capture.”

To realize the potential of a smarter planet, organizations must focus on value, leverage opportunities, and act with speed, Donofrio said. “Don’t confuse yourself. Focus on the problem,” he said. “IBM did not do that in the late 1980s and early 1990s. We rendered ourselves irrelevant in the marketplace. That’s what happened to IBM. That’s how we fell. That’s how we almost lost our company.”

—Phil Rockrohr