Creating a Culture of Innovation
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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 ones.
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 encourage everyday behaviors that help people think creatively.
A good example of such everyday behavior is the way we encourage employees to do research. 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. There’s no formal rule about how we perform these deep searches, just the cultural motivation to do it.
There are a couple of other interesting new activities that we’re using to inspire creative thinking. The Idea Market is an internal prediction market where NI employees can trade ideas like stocks. Employees trade various ideas, buying and selling shares based on whether they believe the ideas will be successful. Over time, the share price becomes an indicator of interest in an idea and a possible predictor of its success. Management watches the market to see which ideas are generating interest and which we may want to implement. We may “buy” the idea and all the shares, in which case the employees whose ideas are “bought out,” as well as employees who “invested” in that idea, receive compensation.
Another activity we have created to foster innovation is the Edison lunch – the name based on Thomas Edison, one of the greatest innovators in history. Every other week, an R&D group holds a 90-minute Edison lunch to discuss ideas that engineers have submitted. Engineers explain their ideas and answer questions from the audience. After every two lunches, a panel of engineering leaders chooses five presenters whose ideas have particular merit. These five presenters receive a financial reward. More importantly, individuals then set goals to more fully develop the idea, leading to further research, a prototype, or even a full research grant.
These are just a few examples of how NI seeks to actively engage employees in innovative and creative thinking. Regardless of the specific activity, however, the core philosophy of NI is that innovation is essential to our long-term success. It is this culture of innovation that ultimately drives our company and employees to think and act creatively.
Mike Santori has been with National Instruments since he graduated from Texas A&M University in 1986 with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. He now serves as an NI Business and Technology Fellow.
This article first appeared in the Q4 2007 issue of Instrumentation Newsletter.
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Reader Comments | Submit a comment »
Good Article
I've been looking at how some
companies are innovative and how they
do it. And NI, in my opinion, is one of the
top innovative companies around. One
of the top items is having an innovative
culture and NI seems to do a really good
job of that.
Thanks for the article.
Joe V
- Joe Varnell, Lockheed Martin MFC-D. joe.varnell@lmco.com - May 28, 2008
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