A recent Microsoft Canada-sponsored survey from Harris/Decima reveals that many Canadian and U.S. office workers believe business leaders need to take more risks in order to fuel more innovation in the workplace.
The survey, conducted by Harris/Decima on behalf of Microsoft Canada from January 5 to January 14 this year, with 504 surveys from a random sample of Canadian office workers and 501 from U.S. office workers, found that 84 per cent of Canadians and 77 per cent of Americans think leaders need to take more risks to create innovation.
Eric Gales, president of Microsoft Canada, said the survey exposes one of the root issues causing the much-talked about productivity and innovation gap.
“The survey showed a large percentage of Canadians and Americans believe their companies need to take more risk,” Gales said. “What we found in the survey is that there’s no shortage of ideas in Canada, but rather it’s the conversion of taking those ideas and innovation and following through with execution.”
The survey also found that only 53 per cent of Canadian and 55 per cent of American respondents feel their companies are already driving innovation in the business.
“I think innovation is one of those words that’s overused,” Gales said. “I see it as a continuum where at one end of the spectrum is invention. How do you evolve a process, product or service in a way you can actually operate? Innovation is about turning an idea into an actual product and delivering output.”
With all this talk about innovation, the question of whether or not it can be measured comes to mind.
“An idea can just exist but innovation we see as being a process that requires an evolution change to a new product or an aggregation of a product to give you a deliverable,” Gales said. To measure innovation, you can look at things like the number of new products, services and patents that come out of it.”
Gales said companies need to create a culture and an environment where employees feel comfortable to suggest things and aren’t afraid to take intelligent risks, regardless of whether or not they’re a channel partner, manufacturer or other type of business.
At Microsoft Canada, Gales said the company tries to create a culture that thrives on innovation, where employees feel they can take risks without being penalized for them.
“You want to be able to fail fast if you’re going to fail,” he said. “We try to engineer a culture where our employees can try things and if they’re not working, they can stop and do something else. Take for example our Kinect for Xbox 360. We could have followed in the footsteps of our competitors with a motion-based controller, but we wanted to go a different route with a motion-controlled device that uses gestures (and spoken commands). This was a huge risk but it’s been a tremendous success. That business went from a $0 to $1.5B business within five months.”
Benson Honig, human resources and management area professor at McMaster University’s DeGroote School of Business and organization behaviour Teresa Cascioli Chair in entrepreneurial leadership, says in general, our North American society is a “mercantile culture” whose history isn’t based on taking risks.
“We need to change that and we need to leverage our terrific human capital and diversity, Honig said. “We’re looking at a global world where the more efficient thrive so we have to be smarter, faster, hungrier and more ambitious. We have lots of immigrants in Canada and we need to figure out how to get them in decision-making positions. For businesses, what seems to work well is creating a sub-unit inside the company that’s relieved of the bureaucratic routines that may kill innovation and ingenuity.”
Follow Maxine Cheung on Twitter: @MaxineCheungCDN.