7 top innovators share strategies that drive cutting edge solutions

Shez Partovi, Chief Innovation and Strategy Officer, Royal Philips: I'm every day waking up saying, “Have I fallen into that trap, have our teams fallen into that trap? Are we just going based on proxies? Do we know the ground truth?”

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Welcome to Meet the Leader, a podcast where top leaders share how they're tackling the world's toughest challenges. In this special episode, I talk to the world's top innovators from healthcare, biotech, engineering, and more about the practical steps they use to stay on the leading edge.

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And please take a moment to rate and review us. I'm Linda Lacina from the World Economic Forum, and this is Meet The Leader.

Cristiano Amon, Qualcomm: Can you solve a real problem? Is this a technology in search of a solution or is actually a true solution?

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: What's really needed to innovate? To push the envelope? I talked to a lot of leaders for this week's episode about this very question. People who are developing autonomous cars and people who are gene editing seeds. People who are reshaping how we live and work, all while tackling even bigger issues. Issues like hunger, issues like climate change.

And at the heart of all this research and development, all these cutting edge technologies, is making sure that the smartest and most creative people in the world are tackling the right problem and building the right solution.

Now getting there isn't easy. It depends on building the right culture and the right capabilities. And this week's leaders share exactly how they do that, how they get people on one page, how they keep teams excited. And the gut checks you need to make from leaders all the way down, to challenge their own thinking.

It is an episode that I think is helpful for anyone to stay nimble and to empower people to drive higher quality, more effective solutions and to give you the framework to drive for more. We'll get started with the questions great leaders ask themselves.

Cristiano Amon is the President and CEO of Qualcomm, and you might have checked out his full interview that we published last week. This company is known for many things, including building one of the very first smartphones. It's now shaping everything from next era robotics and even augmented reality smart glasses.

Cristiano shared with me key mindsets that ground innovators. The first one I think is critical for anyone approaching any kind of transformation.

Cristiano Amon, Qualcomm: I think the first one is can you solve a real problem? Is this a technology in in search of a solution or is actually a true solution? It can solve a real problem. You can have clarity of what the use case or what the use case potential is. I think that's one.

The second one is that sometimes companies that embark on innovation even go to other industries. Just like we were in the process of diversifying ourselves, going into automotive, going into industrial, going into personal computing and entering the PC space. Companies used to make a very good assessment of what their core competencies are like. Do you have the core competencies required for the innovation? And if you don't, do you know how to get it? I think that's the second one. And I think the third one is you need to have motivated teams to embark on that journey.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: When it comes to the questions that great innovators always ask, I couldn't leave out my chat with Shez Partovi.

He is the Chief Innovation and Strategy Officer at Phillips. He's also a former physician turned tech exec whose ideas about innovation and solving big problems were actually first shaped on the hospital floor. He talked with me about the questions that he uses to make sure he's setting the right priorities, and it's a framework that can reveal some surprises once you apply it.

Like whether you are making decisions for the right reasons or just to get something rubber stamped or to please a big boss. Take a listen.

Shez Partovi, Chief Innovation and Strategy Officer, Royal Philips: I'm a firm believer in what might be called evidence-based innovation. Now I borrowed that from evidence-based medicine. So, you will see me always crossing my clinical and my technology worlds together. So, [what] evidence-based innovation really says to me is listen to the signals. What is the pain point?

Focus on those actual signals, whether it's from a patient or clinician, and look at the market trends. And you're really starting from the ground truth and then working backwards from that ground truth. So, evidence-based innovation.

I talk of a ground truth because you know, I will jokingly say the truth will set you free, but first it'll piss you off. So, you have to start from the ground truth, the evidence-base.

The problem with any innovation process is there are two other 'Es' where you fall into a trap. One is expert-based innovation, where you bring key opinion leaders into a room, and the actual ground truth isn't there, it's a proxy.

So, for Philips, for example, on staff, you have an ex-cardiologist — and you say, “Let’s just talk to the cardiologist. She knows what we should do.” That's a trap that one can fall into and which I'm actually actively working to avoid and to make sure that Philips stays focussed on customer-first innovation.

Expert-based innovation — it's comfortable: “Hey, you're a physician. What do you think?” And you have to have discipline not to fall into the trap of expert-based innovation. But it's still not as bad as the last E, which is eminence-based innovation. Which is, you're an eminent person: “I am the Chief Innovation and Strategy Officer. Hear me, hear me.”

Now, of course, sometimes individuals who are “eminent” really base it on evidence, they're translating — but let's put that aside because that's just evidence couched as eminence. But the trap we do fall into sometimes is this eminence-based where you're looking for the highest-ranking title in the room or in the organization — “you tell us what we should do, what does the customer need?”

And so, what we constantly are making sure we don't do by sort of disconfirming our beliefs is [asking] are we really at the evidence? Are we just leveraging experts or are we falling in the trap of eminence? And it's the eminence one that you precisely deploy the wrong thing.

And it's really at the ground truth level that you are able to navigate to really innovate that's that for a clinician, a physician, nurse, or patient. We combine, at Philips, and this is my role. At the heart of it, is to ensure that we are doing customer-first innovation based on ground truth of the pain point of whoever it is we're trying to serve, whether it's a consumer, a health system, a physician, a nurse or sometimes the patient themselves. That is the challenge that I constantly face. That's the headwind I work in, and I'm every day waking up saying, “Have I fallen into that trap, have our teams fallen into that trap? Are we just going based on proxies? Do we know the ground truth?”

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: It takes discipline to make sure that you're not falling into expert-based innovation or even eminence-based. Are there questions people can ask themselves to get them on the right track?

Shez Partovi, Chief Innovation and Strategy Officer, Royal Philips: When I came to Philips, one of the first questions I asked our R&D teams and teams was: “Hey, when was the last time you were with a customer?”

You want no filter between you and the voice of the end user, whether that's the consumer, whether that's a physician, nurse, or patient. So, there is no substitute for the voice of the customer. And so, I would say that if anyone listening, any of your listeners, has a research or innovation team, they should just walk in and ask: “When was the last time you actually spoke with the intended end user and sat with them?” This is partly why Philips does this co-creation because you're actually in that fishbowl with them. And so that there's no question.

There are two dimensions to the voice of the customer. There is the qualitative and quantitative, because you get qualitative signals, and you really should — in an agile way, try to build towards whatever it is you're innovating on their behalf — use quantitative and analytics to validate your direction. So, it isn't just gut intuition: “Hey, I talked to Dr. Jones. She was at that hospital. She said this is the best thing since sliced bread.” Okay, great — voice of the customer. But you need to then go to a quantitative level and validate that. So, I challenged our teams at Philips to voice the customer qualitative validated through quantitative as well. And no substitute to that. Yes, we’ve got key opinion leaders. Yes, we have brilliant individuals who've been in the field for a long time and who are great voices, eminent voices — but no substitute for the ground truth voice of the customer.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Great innovators think about the big picture — beyond a single project. Geraldine Matchett told me about her concept of generational leadership. She's the co-CEO of biotech leader DSM-Firmenich.

Now, success in biotech means taking some pretty big bets, often on projects that not everyone can understand at the time. She talked to us about thinking in the long term — in generations — and why the biggest impact the best leaders will make will be for their successors.

Geraldine Matchett, Royal DSM: We're very fortunate to run the company where our predecessors did so many things right? Whether it's in setting up the culture, the purpose of the mindset and setting a very good pipeline of innovations. And we are in a position to take those commercial.

So, when in our, it is under our era, if you want, that we are making those choices. And when we stop things, I will think of least we are freeing up resources to build something else that will be the basis of the success of the future.

So, you have to have a kind of a generational approach to leadership. It's not the performance here and now only.

Don't get me wrong. I'm still the CFO. Performance matters. But do you look back at yourself in the mirror and say how you've done. Great. If we've had a few years of great success, but we've set up nothing for the future. Sure. Okay. That doesn't work.

So that's what I tell myself sometimes when you have to say stop or pause, it's having a philosophical view of what people did before for our benefit, and benefiting of the next generation.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: She also talked to me about a special framework that her company uses to balance the short- and the long-term when it comes to investing in innovation. Here's Geraldine.

Geraldine Matchett, Royal DSM: The framework that most companies have to think about is what is short term, how much resource to put to the short term versus the long term. And one of the frameworks we've used, for example, in Royal DSM is actually 'red box, blue box' on innovation. So we feel we could afford to carry about 25% of red box, which is a bit more risky, a bit more long term.

Things like reducing methane burped by cattle. Something we worked on for 15 years, that looked a bit esoteric at the start, but actually is highly relevant to climate change today. And then 75% much more current and medium term.

That is the kind of framework that I think any leader needs to have in the context of their own business.

And some industries and sectors maybe it's 50/50. And what is really key is that short term efficiencies can fund your future growth and your future innovation. So those are the kind of frameworks one can use.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Communication is a critical tool in breaking down the silos needed to speed change. Ponsi Trivisvavet knows this well. She is the CEO of Inari, a company gene editing seeds for more sustainable farming.

She explains why her small team is not afraid of the all hands meeting or of building in regular check-ins that keep information flowing and collaboration growing, all to shape solutions as they are being built. Here's Inari. Here's Ponsi.

Ponsi Trivisvavet, Inari: We use 'all hands' a lot. So we meet pretty often for the whole company and actually update everyone on where we are as the whole company in terms of our milestones. The collaboration becomes critical for us. We don't have a silo at all between commercial and the research. So research development and commercial are actually one goal if you go back and how you work together.

My CSO (Chief Scientific Officer), and Chief Product Officer, (CPO), and then the head of commercial talk quite often. So, we call them the triangle. And, in fact, we added another person as well recently, Chief Data and Information Officer. The four of them are actually meeting on a biweekly basis, formally. But informally, I'll give you an example. The chief of product development and the head of commercial actually talk at the minimum every other day. Which never happened in my previous career. Never. So you know exactly what the farmers, the growers, and the seed companies want, and that's the beauty of it.

It's the, the audacious goal that we have together. And that's, that's quite nice that at the end of the day, we go back to our vision. Which is about a renewed Earth and the mission, which is about bringing back the genetic diversity into the seeds.

And people that joined Inari have one common thing that we are all the same, which is sharing the goal of how we actually make the better world via food systems. So once you have one common goal, I think it's just, it just solves everything.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Rodrigo Santos is the president of the Crop Science Division at Bayer Crop Science.

Their technologies protect crops all while protecting food, stocks, farmers', livelihoods, and the planet. He shares how their innovators stay focused an approach based on keeping the user, the farmer, and their own shared vision top of mind. Here's Rodrigo.

Rodrigo Santos, Bayer Crop Science: Yeah, so first needs to be aligned with our vision. And our vision is about how we can produce more and conserve more at the same time. If it's not sustainable, that will not be part of our R&D, our investment, or our focus.

That would be the first one. The second one is we work extremely closely with farmers. We, we work with farmers every day. Thousands and millions of farmers every day, we're calling them. If it's not solving a solution for the farmer or for the future, it doesn't make sense. So align with the vision, helping farmers to be successful. If we help the farmers to be successful, we gonna become successful.

And then we explore. We have open collaboration, we invest. In startups, we do R&D collaboration. We explore different alternatives to look for those solutions that will have an impact on the farmers and help them to produce more and conserve more.

One thing that I feel helps us a lot is when we think about transformational leadership, and that's what we are asking leaders, and that is an important element here, that sometimes you are so focused on the short term that it's hard to drive the transformation of the future.

And how to ensure in a practical way that the agenda of your team is balanced in the short term and also in the long term. So when we are planning for '23 or '24, we focus on developing time among ourselves to debate and discuss the short term. It's important, we need to deliver the results and so on, but at the same time, focus a lot of time on our agenda, and energy in the future in the long term.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Great innovation also means keeping teams engaged and challenged. Lars Stenqvist shared with me how he does this. He is the Chief Technology Officer at Volvo Group and his team designs trucks and buses and equipment all while pioneering solutions that decarbonize transport.

Engineering is a new world he told me and to lead in it the old school top-down control tower approach will not work. Instead, bosses need to flip the script. They need to find new ways to depend on their teams, and this will tap both their creativity and their accountability.

Here's how accountability can lead to innovation.

Lars Stenqvist, Volvo Group: Give the teams the true responsibility and the true mandate. If you are responsible for developing a system, functional component or whatsoever, that team and that management of that team should be responsible not just to develop the project that goes into production next year, but that team should also have the responsibility, take the accountability to really come up with ideas, with the roadmaps for that system, component or whatsoever for upcoming five to 10 years.

There you have the perfect start of such a discussion. Of course, show me your roadmap. Show me your ideas. Where are you taking us?

If you were the CEO or the CTO of this company, where would you take us when it comes to your components? And, and of course they have far too long wishlists for Christmas. They will not get all kind of funds that they ask for, but I mean, that's also the nature of engineering. The day when I would run an organization that had enough money, we wouldn't have more ideas.

This then, you know, then I would really be running a lousy organization. So, running an engineering technology organization, there will always be priorities and that you have to make a cut and say, okay, this is what we're gonna do this year or for now. Continue to think about ideas, continue to think about if you can combine them, can you bundle them?

Can you get it into some of the other activities that we have started? So on and so forth.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Alex Liu seconds the idea that a more challenged team is a more innovative team. He is the managing partner and chairman of Kearney, which is a global consulting firm. He's also the author of Joy Works, a book that digs into the research behind Joy, how it can help with everything from retention, to teamwork, to productivity, and even work as a flywheel for innovation.

Here's Alex explaining why people who feel safe and challenged are more likely to build the momentum needed to spur innovation.

Alex Liu, Kearney: Listen, I think there's a lot of theories about innovation. Innovation is both spontaneous but also very disciplined. That you have to have a combination of the two. You can't have people off, off doing their thing. They're just joyfully doing R&D, but they have no connection to the marketplace. Why don't you put 'em in the room together? Yeah. And that's when you have real-time momentum. Then you may have real-time innovation, and that if you, if you're in that room at that time, I gotta tell you, there's so much electric energy, there's so much joy, there's so much purpose activated.

Then of course, the innovation, it may not work out, but there's certainly the sense of co-creation with other people is in itself a source of well-being and positive hormones. And that may be what you refer to in the sort of momentum side, and then you get some success, and you do it again. And then you have a whole company that's involved around this culture of entrepreneurial innovation.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: That concludes the top mindsets and tactics from some of the world's best innovators. Thanks so much to the leaders who talked to me for this episode. And thanks so much to you for listening.

A transcript of this episode is available at Wef.ch slash podcasts.

This episode of Meet the Leader was presented and produced by me with Juan Toran as studio engineer for interviews recorded at the annual meeting in Davos and Gareth Nolan driving studio production.

That's it for now. I'm Linda Lacina with the World Economic Forum, and this is Meet the Leader. Have a great day.