Just a short flight to contend with and we arrived in Barcelona to take part in Axiom Groupe’s Innovation Excellence event. This will be the 2nd time we have participated so we were looking forward to seeing some familiar faces and hopefully some new ones too.
The event kicked off with Herman Wories of DSM talking about their plans for the future and what the fundamentals are for increasing sales in DSM. They have a vision to see a 20% sales growth by 2020 by innovating for growth not for the portfolio. It is clear to see that in such a huge company they favour structure and processes but interestingly which some organisations don’t do enough is that it’s not just R&D where innovation is happening but within their other business units too therefore utilising all the resources they have which ultimately speeds up their growth. Herman also touched upon creating the right culture and encouraging employee engagement as one of the most difficult areas to improve upon.
So it seemed that the theme was set for the day! Michael Hess from Siemens who spoke about Innovation in an Enterprise 2.0 also discussed how important it is to have the right culture in the organisation especially when it comes to using Web 2.0 tools to improve innovation speed. It’s tough to encourage everyone to use these tools so we agree that it must be done in a pilot phase, step by step with a nucleus of people who are truly committed to using these tools to improve the innovation process. Once you have the success here this is where you get the commitment Top-Down. Which is the most difficult bottom-up or top-down change? This is a debate that continued throughout the event long into the night!
Thankfully it wasn’t all work! The Ajuntament de Barcelona had invited us to a cocktail reception at the Palau Centelles where we would hear Jordi William Carnes the Deputy Mayor for Treasury and Economic Promotion speak about the changes and innovation opportunities in Barcelona. Unfortunately Sr. Jordi was running a bit late as he was stuck in a meeting with the Mayor but the Cava helped placate us all. Later we all went out to discover the great cuisine of Barcelona with Felix Previdoli of Lonza, Dave Roberts of Pepsico and Michel Pozas Lucic of Air France KLM to name just a few. Great night had by all!
With the recurring theme of making the most of people in your organisation and improving engagement among employees we would say this is one of the biggest challenges organisations are facing at the moment. Companies have to be global but also local coupled with the growth opportunities in Asia and Brazil is a monumental challenge to contend with. Creating the right culture locally and providing the right platforms to collaborate will create a global culture of innovation but remember don’t run before you can walk!
