TORONTO – Canadian companies are not as innovative as they could be because they don’t know how best to commercialize their inventions, and, they’re too afraid to fail, says Victor J. Garcia, the new chief technology officer at Bell Business Markets.
Speaking at the Canadian Wireless Trade Show in Toronto about the need for meaningful innovation in large corporations like telecom, Garcia cautioned that companies who don’t actively promote and foster innovation run the risk of becoming irrelevant and commoditized.
“One of the biggest problems that we have is that we become encased in reinforced silos”, he told delegates. “Sometimes it’s the office, the company, the province, the country, we don’t look beyond… Even though we realize that we live globally, we forget to look globally and act globally… and that is the principle to exploring other ways to do things.”
Garcia said that it’s “shocking” that less than 1% of global corporations have a deep, corporate-wide environment of innovation. Noting exceptions such as AT&T, Hewlett Packard, and Proctor & Gamble, he used Silicon Valley as a successful example of a “marketplace” that allows talent and ideas to easily find each other, connect with funding, and collaborate to bring an idea to fruition.
“In today’s world, corporations are anything but a marketplace”, he said. “Most corporations are closer to a pre-socialist state than to the New York stock exchange. Things move at a glacial pace… and bureaucracy impedes the process of innovation – people feel that the further they are from the top of the pyramid, the least impact they have on innovation, when the fact is, innovation comes from the fringes, seldom from the top.”
So why are there not more large corporations with a true systemic architecture of innovation in place? Garcia says that the answer to this is wrapped up in the challenges of shifting the corporate status quo, noting that implementing an environment of innovation “puts power in different hands, enables new structures, new hierarchies and brings democracy back in to the process”.
“What if we could have a worldwide innovation infrastructure; a system that is global, allows people to find money, find sponsors, find abilities through other people and labs, to get help with prototypes and everything that makes innovation happen”, he added. “That would be incredible.”
