How to innovate? Google exec explains; The best type of innovation is disruptive innovation. Who better to teach it than a star Google exec who ran the Pentagon’s R&D arm?

December 20, 2013 Leave a comment

How to innovate? Google exec explains

By Patricia Sellers December 17, 2013: 8:51 AM ET

The best type of innovation is disruptive innovation. Who better to teach it than a star Google exec who ran the Pentagon’s R&D arm?

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FORTUNE — Disruptive innovation is the kind that unhinges old ways of operating, juices competition and creates new growth. One of the world’s leading experts on the subject is Regina Dugan, Motorola Mobility’s SVP in charge of Advanced Technology and Projects, a skunkworks-inspired unit devoted to delivering breakthrough innovations. Dugan joined Motorola Mobility, part of Google (GOOG), last year after heading the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon’s R&D unit where scientific inflection points and critical applications–the essence of disruptive innovation, she says–have often intersected. DARPA’s legacy of radical innovation includes RISC computing, the Internet, miniaturized GPS, and those unmanned aerial vehicles popularly known as drones.

I saw Dugan speak on a panel about Interactive Technology at Ernst & Young’s recent Strategic Growth Forum. Her advice about organizing for innovation success in an environment swirling with change was smart and practical. So I asked her to share it here. Dugan’s Rx for disruptive innovation:

1. Get uncomfortable.
Make a list of the biggest and boldest projects in your company.  Ask yourself how many make you deeply uncomfortable because they could change your fundamental business model.  If a project has disruptive potential, it should make you uncomfortable.

2. Create a small, agile team.
While you can organize a large company to support evolutionary R&D, that doesn’t work with disruptive innovation. You need a small and agile organization. If you have fewer than 200 people, you don’t need a lot of process and you can talk to almost anyone by stepping out of your office and talking a little loud. (I’m Italian.)

3. Refresh the team constantly.
Ask yourself how many people on your innovation team have been there more than five years. If the answer is “a lot,” you’re in trouble. Then ask yourself how many people on your team are from outside the organization. If the answer is “almost none,” more trouble. You need fresh thinking from people on the outside as well as the inside. Short tenures create necessary urgency.

4. Restrict decision-making to no more than two people.
If you have more than two people making decisions about strategy and execution, it’s too many. Disruptive innovation is not about consensus. The CEO or the team leader should have strong and ultimate authority.

5. Create tension.
A disruptive innovation group exists, in part, to create tension. So don’t be surprised when that happens. Disruptive innovation will challenge processes, challenge HR, and challenge your perspective on IP—while it upsets your ideas about who gets to be involved in the development process. The result: the speed and flexibility you need for effective disruptive innovation.

For more on how to organize for disruptive innovation, read “Special Forces” Innovation: How DARPA Attacks Problems by Regina Dugan & Kaigham Gabriel in the October issue of the Harvard Business Review.

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Unknown's avatarAbout bambooinnovator
Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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