The artificial heart, video calls, virtual fitting rooms, shirts made of plastic bottles, wallpaper that changes color depending on the mood of the person in the room… Until recently one could only come across such things in a sci-fi movie or novel. Nowadays, however, not only are they becoming a part of our everyday reality, but are also affordable to people at large.
World industrial leaders like Apple, Twitter, Facebook, Nissan, or Google avoid banal ways of operating and move their products onto new planes, making billions in the process. The secret of their success boils down to one word: innovation. This concept, old as mankind itself, yet particularly popular today, brings leadership in the world market and billions in dividends to those who have grasped its essence.
Why isn’t a single Ukrainian company on this list? How and when could it appear? How can Ukrainian business become more successful, and the Ukrainian economy more competitive? The participants of the annual nation-wide conference, organized by the Lviv Business School at the Ukrainian Catholic University, tried to answer these and other questions. This year The Day was an information partner to this conference, whose full name was “Intro 2011. Breakthrough Innovations: from Generating to Implementing.”
Nearly 100 leading experts, scholars, and representatives of Ukrainian (and not only Ukrainian) top management convened in Lviv to find a recipe which would help transform business thinking in Ukraine and make it more innovative. The Ukrainian business environment is still focused on so-called “companies with a history,” which are reluctant to change and respond to today’s challenges — despite the fact that Ukraine does a lot better in global innovation rankings than in business conditions ones. Their CEOs are slow in trying to overcome their industries’ outdated models, and they mainly do it by firing employees or seeking legal action. This only results in short-term gains, simply delaying the inevitable. Indeed, according to the renowned American scholar, economist, essayist, and marketing theorist Peter Drucker (whose aphorism was suggested as a motto for Intro 2011 by Sofia Opatska, director of the Lviv Business School): “Marketing and innovation produce results; the rest are ‘costs.’”
After the organizers’ opening report Opatska gave the floor to Karl Zaininger, founder and CEO of Global Technology Management Consultants, and executive vice president and research director at Siemens Corporate Research.
“Today innovation sounds like a mantra already, and I’ve got a feeling that this word is a panacea for all troubles. It is being used by everyone, from businessmen and politicians to presidents and even psychologists,” Zaininger began. But isn’t this word getting too much attention? According to the expert, it isn’t. It’s a bit too late to discuss innovation as a subject or a process. It’s high time to speak about the intensity and speed of innovation processes. It is a curious and irrefutable fact that today Siemens knows that as much as 75 percent of their expected profit in the next five years is to come from products they have not yet developed. Thus, Ukrainian companies with ambitious goals that want to achieve them should considerably reduce the terms for forecasts and business plans, and not be upset by crises, but consider them as a source of the necessary change and opportunity.
After Zaininger’s speech, in order to have a full-fledged debate with an adequate outcome, the organizers suggested listening to a report concerning the innovative experiences of the most progressive Ukrainian companies in this sphere — Microsoft, Kyivstar, and ZM Ukraina.
An improvised ensemble consisting of Olena Kropyvianska, director for HR and organization development at Kyivstar, Yaryna Kliuchkovska, director for corporative communications at Microsoft Ukraine, and Sofia Olifant, CEO of ZM Ukraina, tried to come up with answers to the following questions: What are the methodologies and systems for developing innovative thinking? How can one create and develop organizational innovation culture? And how can one keep abreast with innovations in this age of ultra-fast changes?
All three spoke about their experience with generating and implementing innovations in their companies. And all three eventually reached the same conclusion: to create a truly innovative business, one needs to combine three ingredients — innovative solutions technology, a favorable environment, and the donor of innovations, a person (or a group) capable of producing new, useful ideas. If at least one of these components is missing, the company will not obtain the expected result. Moreover, it is doomed to waste quite a lot of the already invested money.
However, according to the expert, Ukrainian businesses will usually get stuck on the last component, namely human resources. “Ukraine has a huge potential in the sphere of new ideas and innovations. This is an inexhaustible resource, which we should learn to keep up and capitalize,” said Kliuchkovska. “Faults in education are an important hindrance here. The students of technical universities are not taught to correctly formulate and present their ideas, while the students of economics cannot find a common language with engineering students.”
The first conference day was closed by a video panel with the participation of Frans Johansson, who presented the translation of his book The Medici Effect: Ground-Breaking Innovation at the Intersection of Disciplines and Cultures from a series printed by Harvard Business Publishing.
The organizers suggested opening the second conference day with a presentation by a US architect, senior vice president at Wight&Company, Lois Vitt Sale. Sale spoke about the strategy of ecological engineering, which has now become extremely popular in the US. Yet the idea started to develop at the initiator’s own peril. “However, even now, if you want to build according to green building standards, you should not expect any state references in the US,” said the architect. “It’s your own business idea, so just like any other business decision, it is your own responsibility.”
Then Tomasz Rudolf, co-founder of the innovative Polish company iCanPilot, talked about implementing the best business strategies. He encouraged participants to answer seven basic questions which, according to him, are essential for one to have innovative products or services.
After the training session held by Rudolf, a masculine trio — Taras Kytsmey, president and co-founder of SoftServe, Valerii Pekar, president of Euroindex Ltd., and Vsevolod Onyshkevych, an American of Ukrainian descent, founder and CEO of In Vino Veritas Inc. — offered a response to the purely feminine group from the previous day. They explained how one can make it into the five percent of successful companies, how to establish the process of production and implementation of innovations inside a company, how one can remain a systemic and at the same time innovative company, as well as about guarantees of success and causes of failure.
There are several ways business can react to change. One can do nothing, just respond somehow. Yet the best way, for a company with leadership ambitions, is to implement innovations. In other words, if you want to make a correct forecast of the future, you should create it yourself. This was the conclusion of the participants of Intro 2011. Today the market is not safe, there will always be someone wanting to oust you. Therefore, in order to keep one’s ground and move forward, one should not be afraid of change, advised Zaininger. Kropyvianska concluded her speech with the words from Lewis Carrol’s Through the Looking-Glass: “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.”
