The Future of Innovation – at Fujitsu

James Woudhuysen delivers the keynote address to Fujitsu UK & Ireland’s conference of Distinguished Engineers, held on 24 September 2015 at Warwick University

This presentation focuses on some of the key issues engineers at Fujitsu should consider when they go about innovation. After a quick sprint through those geopolitical and technological issues too serious to do more than touch on, the speech preface make a polemic against faddish use of the term ‘disruption’ to describe today’s actually rather halting rate of technological progress. In IT, energy and robotics, technological advance is not what it could be. On the other hand the growing use and ingenuity of older workers confirms the significance of demographic issues to Fujitsu engineers, while disasters such as Hurricane Katrina’s effect on New Orleans say more about weak engineering of infrastructure than they do about climate change.

Passing now to the formal business of the keynote, James puts forward his own, simple but tight definition of innovation. Then, to illustrate both progress and setbacks in innovation, he contrasts rising demand for energy in the East with an energy supply side that is heavily financialised, and profoundly weak in R&D. While oil producers in the Gulf States have committed to innovation, learned writers in the Harvard Business Review can be found advocating a Minimum Viable Innovation System (MVIS) which demands very little of anyone toying with it.

By contrast, the significance of genuine innovation and of investment in R&D is apparent in a contemporary development such as the Internet of Things. With the rise of the IoT, IT people such as those at Fujitsu will have to learn more about Things, not just IT. With IT not just modeling reality but being integrated with it, IT people need to have ambitions higher than that of a MVIS. They need to get closer to their clients’ experiments, prototypes and R&D departments. Fujitsu people will have to manage more, more reliable experiments that they make the most of and whose results they abide by.

Yes, there’s a need to learn from practical failures, which are inevitable but which can be learned from. Yes, companies are risk-averse. But the barriers to innovation, which are considered too rarely, extend way beyond risk aversion.

There’s a need to overcome the You can’t say that! culture in companies. There’s a need to overcome the tangles laid down by the patents system and by regulation. Yes, there are problems with shareholders, short-term vision and companies that work in silos. But the biggest and most neglected barrier to innovation, bigger even than risk aversion, is a whole and deep sensibility to and frequent exaggeration of risk that can be termed risk consciousness. With that kind of outlook The Banning Mentality rides pillion, a mentality that is inimical to experiment and innovation.

In the face of these heavyweight barriers to innovation, Fujitsu needs to champion the Voltairean spirit of free speech. We must be tolerant of all views on science, technology and their commercialisation. That, however, means that, to be truly distinguished, Fujitsu’s Distinguished Engineers will always want to make judgments about the ideas that are expressed. That way, innovation can once again move forward.