Yahoo Finance Where Canadian technology innovation must begin
After about 15 or 20 minutes, only two of the marshmallow towers were still standing in an Edmonton hotel ballroom. They rested atop a series of uncooked spaghetti pieces, bound with a little bit of masking tape and some string. They represented the ability of seasoned technology executives to successfully work together – many cases, their failure.
The marshmallow challenge has become a popular management training technique whereby groups of business people are given a short period to do something simple. Here, at national gathering of chief information officers this week, it was used to help attendees understand why innovation seems so hard to cultivate in Canada.
Evan Hu, co-founder of Toronto-based consulting firm Ideaca, explained that even the brightest IT gurus sometimes struggle with the marshmallow challenge because they lack the “experimental mindset” of children, who perhaps don’t take it as seriously and are more ready to make mistakes.
“IT people love to plan,” he said. “But the planning mindset can increase your chances for failure.”
There’s the dilemma in a nutshell. Canadian companies are criticized for not being competitive enough, not productive enough and not innovative enough despite the raft of technology tools at their disposal. Yet they need to do some kind of planning in order to prepare for suddenly disruptive forces in their organization or industry.
Hung LeHong, a senior analyst at Gartner Canada, was one of the other speakers at the conference, where he talked about things like near-field communications, in-memory database management systems, and other concepts that probably aren’t familiar to non-IT executives. Some of the stuff he showed was pretty far out, including a fridge with a camera that could convey information about how much beer someone has left, or audio recognition tools that allow an iPad, for example, to hear what someone’s watching on TV and offer related advertising on their tablet.
“What I’d suggest is to really think about all of these interesting things which can be done,” he told the audience.
That’s one place innovation can begin: with answers to the question, “What can be done?” Another possibility I’d suggest is “What do you wish could be done, but aren’t possible today?” And those answers don’t necessarily have to be about creating new products or services. Few Canadian companies are going to come up with the industry equivalent of an iPod or a iPad for their employees and customers. At best, they will cautiously adopt existing hardware and software as it becomes more mature.
Innovation, however, can also be about process. It could be using technologies in ways that speed up how something happens, or makes it cheaper to make something happen. It could be something that improves communication or decision-making among managers, suppliers or even customers. Innovation can be the means by which chief information officers collaborate with their peers in sales, marketing, human resources or other functions.
The marshmallow towers in themselves didn’t offer any value, but the method by which groups in the workshop built them was what really mattered. Though Canadian firms could probably do a better job of making good use of next-generation technologies, they also need to realize that real innovation is sometimes less about making something different, but doing what you’ve always done a little differently.
