Managing Technology and Innovation

In writing about managing technology and innovation, I will start at the beginning. In this article, I will cover a few definitions and examples.

Even though many of us who know each other discuss all this on the sidelines, I want to lay it out for any reader that might be interested to follow instead of jumping right into the special topics. Thus, I am starting with some beginning topics to lay a foundation to all the readers of this.

So, where those of you more experienced with managing technology and innovation are reading through this, there are spots where you will think "and next is where the problems come in," I leave those all unexamined until a future newsletter article to delve into those specific topics.

Technology Versus Innovation

Technology is not required to be divorced from innovation and the two topics are often linked. However, they are not quite the same thing. In the most general sense, think of technology as the support structure that allows us to innovate. It is what we use to solve the challenges that innovation presents to us.

Innovation is when we come up with ideas to create something new and different. We are trying to move outside the current box of ideas and situations into something new.

Innovation might rely on a technology that is common and that the company already owns or uses. Other times, innovation looks at new technologies that might be needed to support the idea. Where innovation is looking at a potential new technology, it is often based on an emerging technology that sounds promising, and innovation can also drive invention (the creation of a technology).

The technology an innovation requires might be a type of software or hardware (or both). However, some innovation requires new mathematical algorithms and these can be considered a type of technology, as well.

Managing technology is not the same as managing innovation but they can be tightly linked in some cases where they seem as if they are one and the same, possibly following the same deadlines, initiatives, projects or other types of activities in such tight coordination that they are being managed as one.

Managing Technology

If a technology exists, we probably already know how to manage it. For example, if it is software, we know the architecture required to support it, the types of technical people we need to manage it, and a variety of other factors. When I say "we," I mean that, generally-speaking, it's not a mystery to the people who work with it. I do not mean that it is easy for someone who knows nothing about it to understand.

The same is true of equipment/instruments/hardware. Any tactile item tends to have a procedure that we follow in order to use it.

These days, whether you have a mixer for producing cereal or are running complex scientific instruments, you usually have both that tactile item plus some computer and software running, as well. Of course, if you're so small that you're using the manual technology of a bowl and a spoon to mix something, that is not typical for the size of the companies most of us are talking about. That is not to say we wouldn't find other types of manual methods within our companies, though.

Two Categories of Technology

Within Technology, I would say that we can think of two basic categories or focuses within it:

• Technology needed to support and run the business.
• Technology to support innovation.

These are not mutually exclusive. However, as much as you should try to combine the two where you can (for support reasons, cost reasons, etc...), you should not insist that one satisfies the purposes of the other. Consider that that intersection looks exactly the same as it did in math class from our younger years but imagine it with greater and lesser areas of intersection:

Supporting Innovation With Technology and Culture

But how do we manage innovation? How do we get the right technology to support innovation?

Innovation is managed more by corporate culture and the culture's handling of procedures than by the technology, directly. Without the flexibility and culture to innovate and to develop or modify procedures to support it, it is unlikely that there will be innovation.

While not every innovation needs something special from technology, when it does need something special, that is the true test of the internal systems.

Let's consider this simple example: let us suppose that your company hands every employee a corporate laptop and that they hand out only one version of laptop to everyone to keep support simple and to allow for cost reductions based on an economy-of-scale that you might negotiate.

However, as your company grows, one day, suppose you now have a group innovating something that requires heavy analysis work beyond what those corporate laptops can handle. Now what do you do?

Here we see a great example of either a supporter or an inhibitor of innovation. It is not the IT rule "one identical laptop for every employee" that is the issue. The true issue is the culture surrounding it and the way the situation is handled.

One more issue to point-out is that innovation does not always involve high-tech ideas. Companies innovate on flavors for their products, for example. Again, if the internal culture insists that the idea of developing crab-flavored cookies is out of the question for the cookie factory, it is the same example of a dominant culture ruling the situation.

When the Technology Doesn't Exist or is Not Fully Mature

Here, we run into a bit of an issue. Some innovation comes about based on technologies that don't fully exist or that exist but aren't yet practical for use.

ML (Machine Learning) is probably our best modern example. We have talked about ML for decades but it was just not that practical to put into use, for most of us.

Even today, when we talk about the types and costs of the computers needed to do some of the work, we still run into obstacles, as well as some other issues that stand in the way of fully achieving some of what we are trying to do with it.

Finally

Many of the readers of this will be in the lab/manufacturing/biotech/pharma spaces where it is common to run across these situations and issues. For those who are not in these spaces, even in some of the other areas there are innovation initiatives and efforts.