How To Incubate Innovation with Eoin Woods

Tech Reimagined

Innovation is a strategic game with long-term results. To play it right, one must ask the right questions, and create the proper context and space to help people thrive. Join Bradley and Eoin Woods this week as they discuss a subject very important to him and Endava – innovation in technology. Delve a bit into how we foster innovation within our teams and what it means for everyone involved.

Bradley Howard: Eoin, today I really want to talk about how to incubate innovation. So what are the essential preconditions for novelty of cultures within organizations?

Eoin Woods: Thanks Bradley. It's a complicated question, isn't it? Because so many people talk about innovation and so many people say they've delivered innovation and yet sometimes it's quite hard to know what they mean. For me, innovation is, I think what you said in the introduction is real impactful change to the way the organizations either work or deliver the services or the products that they create. I think the most essential precondition for innovation within an organization is an acceptance of failure. I hear quite a lot of, we sometimes even get this with our clients who are, hear quite a lot of organizations talking about the need for innovation and how they want to innovate and then when they start talking to people about let's start doing some innovation they say, " How long will it take? How much will it cost, and what will I get?" And I always look at them slightly confused.

Well if it's innovation you won't know any of those things in the beginning. I'm afraid that's just development or business development or whatever it is. I think taking risks, I think being prepared to learn from failures and doing failures is a positive thing, which is much easier said than done especially when it's your money you're spending. I really do feel for senior managers who just feel that they're abandoning money to a black hole but they do have to let go and just see what happens. And I think the other precondition is the fact that innovation is actually done in the business.

The biggest anti pattern I see in innovation is a separate innovation center. You can always tell innovation centers because the people dress differently and they have totally non- standard IT hardware. If the organization is a window center, they will inevitably have max. If the main organization is a max center, they will inevitably have Linux machines and they go off and innovate in a bubble and then when they try and come back and apply that innovation, the organization kind of rejects the organism because it just doesn't fit with the way the organization works and its real needs.

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