| Eye On Innovation |
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| Sep 30 2007 | |
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Page 1 of 2 Creating a Culture of Innovation
High-tech companies live and die by their ability to innovate. Creating new products and technologies is essential to gaining new customers as well as keeping current customers. We often associate innovation with visionary individuals who have a great idea and make it successful. But is innovation to be done only by a few visionary figures? National Instruments has certainly benefited from the visionary leadership of our company founders. Under the tutelage of those leaders, we strive to create a culture of innovation, encouraging all employees to think creatively. By this, we’re not talking about the employee suggestion box in the cafeteria. We stress the importance of innovation in many ways; some very formally, others quite informally. We celebrate successes at company meetings and at NIWeek, our annual user conference. We encourage everyday behaviors that help people think creatively.
advertisement: A good example of such everyday behavior is the way we encourage employees to do research. Dr. James Truchard, our president, CEO, and co-founder, has always stressed the importance of constant research on technologies that might relate to the NI vision and strategy. In the pre-Internet era, Dr. Truchard frequently disappeared in the afternoon and returned the next morning with a stack of books and magazines from the University of Texas at Austin library.
Today, of course, you can access vast amounts of information on the Internet without leaving your desk. We’ve coined the phrase “deep Googling” to describe how we use the Internet. The Googling part is obvious, but the more important concept is going “deep.” Very often, you don’t discover the creative twist on a technology in the first few pages of a Google search. It’s often only after reading a few thousand links that you come across slightly different perspectives that spark your creativity. “Deep Googling” requires that you dig through a high percentage of irrelevant information to find the real nuggets. Keeping track of the nuggets is not so simple. In this high-tech age, we still find it effective to simply print out the pages you find interesting and put these pages in a binder. The binder is a record of the meandering you did on the Internet that can spark others to build on your idea or branch out in a totally new direction. One very important formal part of our culture is our leadership development training. NI could have outsourced development of this training, but decided to cultivate it internally to ensure that the training fully reflects the core philosophies of our culture. |
By Mike Santori