'Innovation' has been thrown around so often in technology circles that to some, it's a four-letter word.
At one tech company, innovation can mean bringing a dazzling new product to store shelves. At another, it can translate to a tiny new button on a website. That's why, executives say, the word itself has been overused and devalued.
Still, new cutting-edge products mean everything to a successful tech company.
Executives from eBay, HP, Microsoft and others were in California at SDForum's first Corporate Innovation and Research Fair on Friday to talk about their techniques for staying creative. Each company has its own style, with some strategies that overlap. But they all acknowledged it's not easy to innovate, especially considering that large corporate cultures can be a curse to fresh ideas.
Max Mancini, eBay's senior director of Platform and Disruptive Innovation, went so far as to say that Silicon Valley venture capitalists wouldn't make so much money on start-up investments if tech companies were better at developing new products.
"Venture capital firms thrive on inefficiencies in large organisations," said Mancini, who spoke at the gathering held at the Computer History Museum.
His counterpart at HP added to the idea by saying that demands from Wall Street and senior management can stifle innovation. "If you're a larger company, there's high probability you have creative people [in your organisation]. But creative people get impatient," said Rich Friedrich, director of HP's Enterprise Systems and Software Lab.
That means these companies must either invest billions in research and development units, or incorporate policies to ensure people dream up new products. Google, of course, asks engineers to spend 20 percent of their time on pet projects. Microsoft, in contrast, employs more than 800 researchers in labs around the world.
A bottom-up style
Roy Levin, Microsoft's director of research in Silicon Valley, said one reason the labs have proven helpful to Microsoft, including bringing products such as Windows Media to consumers, is their bottom-up style. The labs' researchers pick projects themselves and collaborate with each other. They're also not beholden to profit-and-loss goals or managers, he said.
"Every time you introduce [managerial] hierarchy, you introduce barriers to collaboration; and collaboration is key," Levin said.
But once a technology is ready, transferring it to a product group or bringing it to market can be highly difficult, he said. That's why so-called technology transfers are "a contact sport", he said. Researchers must travel a lot to get new ideas and prototypes in front of the right people, Levin said.
eBay's Mancini said the auction company does two big things to promote creativity. The first is operating a technology platform...
