Карл Цайнінгер - президент та голова правління компанії Global Technology Management Consultants, що спеціалізується на оптимізації бізнес-процесів та глобальному технологічному менеджменті. Його компанія запровадила методику розробки нових продуктів „Час продавати” [Time-to-Market]. Крім цього, пан Цайнінгер є директором літніх програм та професором Принстонського університету.
Він отримав ступені маґістра та доктора наук з Інженерної фізики в Університеті Прінстона, закінчив програму управлінського розвитку в Гарвардській Бізнес-Школі.
Професор Цайнінгер був віце-президентом та директором з розвитку консалтингової компанії Thomas Group, пізніше – заступником Голови правління ради директорів, президентом, генеральним директором, виконавчим віце-президентом та директором з досліджень компанії Siemens Corporate Research and Support, Inc. Крім цього, доктор Цайнінгер працював над багатьма проектами уряду США, включаючи програми U.S. Army Electronics Technology and Devices Laboratory та Solar Energy Research Institute.
Карл Цайнінгер викладає курс "Управління технологічними інноваціями" в Києво-Могилянській Бізнес-Школі [kmbs].
Інтерв'ю проводив Павло Шеремета, декан Києво-Могилянської Бізнес-Школи [kmbs]
Pavlo Sheremeta: You were Chief Technology Officer of Siemens USA. And this job pretty much is about innovations itself.
Karl Zaininger: But in that time we did not call it innovation. We called it research or R&D, but this concept I don't like at all. Because nobody knows what R&D is. R&D is a place in the annual report, where people put down how much money they spent on some mysterious things like research and development. And how much money were spent on research and how much were spent on development. I think one has to be very careful in defining how much money should go to both of these directions.
Research - by definition - is trying to define out something new that was not known before. And there would be two parts of it. One that you said just simply goes and uncover stuff that we know already existed and another part of it - you simply find the new things that noone knew before and that's what is called research.
P.S: Have you been global laboratory for the global Siemens company?
K.Z.: Siemens wanted to establish research outpost in the United States. USA was known as an innovative country, because it was more freedom. So the idea was: they needed someone in the United States who was recognized as an American and contributed to the research in America and people talked to him. You need the entrance card to the society. But the idea then was to find what are the real things that happening in the United States, try to do industry and university relationships, because he could find out what universities are working on, so what are far out things and try to bring as fast as possible from Siemens USA to Siemens in Germany and then worldwide again. And total cooperation would have advantage of that. There were a number of areas that we actually guiding to in IT area that I do.
So we did a lot in artificial intelligence, speech recognition, speaker identification, finger print analysis, very far out things. We did on factory automation. We worked with early workstations that were coming out. The idea was to get into things that were on the first front of the technology development. That was called research. And it was not called innovation. In my opinion it was not innovation. It was research.
P.S.: And how do you define innovation?
K.Z.: Innovations is something new somewhere in the world. Whether it is fashion, new cuisine, methodology or new technology, anything, that is new that has never been done before is an innovation. But that is too broad definition.
Then the question is that should we say that innovation is something new that we introduce that has benefits to the society. That is more restricted definition. And we have a problem by asking what is benefit for the society and how do you measure that.
Another difficult that come to my head is that almost all innovations have good parts and bad parts. I always say about TNT and Atomic Energy, depends how you use it. Since I am a technologist I'd like to define technological innovation as follows, and that helps a lot to try to teach the people what are really the steps what we need to do. The first thing, I define technological innovation as an introduction of new ideas and concepts. Step two is transformation of this concept into new processes, new products and new services. And step number three is to sell those for profit. So new ideas, new concepts, transform them into products and services and sell it for profit is technological innovation.
It is very helpful, because when I ask people sometimes in the first step of the innovation is this a good idea if I have an idea, how do you define is it a good idea? So then go back to the definition of innovation that will help you to define what is good idea or a bad idea.
So the first thing you have to ask is it a good idea for our corporation, does it fit the strategy, what our corporation is all about. What do we do, what is our purpose in mind? Second question is very simple now. Can we transform this idea into a product or into service? And the third question is the next: can we also sell it for the profit? Because in the free world on the free market, the profit and social corporate responsibility is a driving force of it.
Now the free steps of course require different people.
P.S.: What step is the most difficult one?
K.Z.: I think they are all difficult. I like Peter Drucker very much, because the idea is good when you work on it. And that's the leading to this question. The other hand of course if we have know good ideas, all rest of the process fall a part. So you need a lot of ideas and creative people for that. This is what we called front-end. The only way that you can encourage generation of good ideas is by having a corporate culture that supports it. None risk ever is in culture when people say "Yes, I can make small mistake because I can learn from that" plus a lot of other thing like freedom and creativity for the people upfront. Everyone spends 10-15% of their time on thinking about ideas that have nothing to do with their project they are working now. I'm fully supporting, because not everyone is creative. And creative people, especially very creative people have ideas every day, so you have tremendous number of ideas if you have very creative people. There is no company in the world that can work on all of these ideas. And I think I am completely correct that after the front-end comes the very disciplined process, because you need other two steps to be successful.
So the first part is very free situation where you have people you let them thinking, you let them come up with idea, encourage this ideas. But from then on it becomes very disciplined because you have to collect rapidly all those ideas, you have to quickly evaluate those ideas whether they good or not because time goes on, the world is changing. Market windows can disapear, and if you don't act quickly in the beginning, you might have a great idea but at the time being but when you transform it the market window can go.
But this is top-management. This is not the creative people. Creative people - you can not order them, you can not say "Tomorrow morning at 8 o'clock sit down and come up with idea". Ideas come in the shower or somewhere. So the discipline process is top-management process. This got to be a strong schedule of meetings, review of ideas, questinioning does it fit to our strategy. If it does - it is a good idea, the second question is do we have resources to do that, do we have time to do that, and the technology for this required and so on. This a long list of criteria that those people have to apply in order to evaluate if it a good idea. So if they say it to be a good idea, we have to come up with a business plan. Without a business plan it does not work. In military you should have a battle plan how you are going to do that.
P.S.: Do you agree with people who say that there is no science in the innovation?
K.Z.: I totally disagree. I am not sure if the science is a right word here but methodology. And I push this very hard that we have face-gate process, which I like.
The face-gate process is a very basic common sense idea; there are 5 phases in a new product development. First phase is ideas generation, second one is a business plan generation, these are front end stages, then you start to define the resources, you do design, development, testing, verification, prototype and new start manufacturing. You do a pilot line. You use a methodology. These things have to be done in a very careful way, well-planned. So I believe very much that there is a methodology. But you need a different people for that.
You need creative people and you have to leave them alone to create ideas, and then you have management, engineers to design, develop and testing and so on and then you need of course the marketing people, the sales people to sell this stuff for profit. Well, you have idea generators, you have the developers, you have the marketing people and on the top of that you need good management to make the right decisions.
P.S.: How did you manage those two parts: since you are managing both of those parts - very creative idea generators and disciplined engineers, was it complicated?
K.Z.: The job of making sure that you have a good innovative process has become very difficult. If you go back and take a look at the history of R&D, which just have started after World War II of different generations of R&D managers. First one was MIT method that we called "the strategy of hope" which says "hire the best people, pay them a lot of money, put them away somewhere in the beautiful place like a country club. Don't bother them, leave them totally alone with all the equipment that they need and they will come up with good ideas. There was at that time no emphasis on the transformation partly good ideas. So the strategy of hope only worked for 15 years when the companies especially in America were wealthy and could effort to do that. And they suddenly find out that we can not effort to do that. So we went through a number of R&D management generations. Today we have R&D generation management number 4. And that management methodology that we have today, that innovations process is not only that is owned by R&D but this is a responsibility of the top-management from the Chief Financial Officer all the way down to the Human Resource Officer and Chief Technology Officer. Because they time frame is so much fasten now.
P.S.: Who is the source of innovation? Up to now you mentioned R&D as a source of innovation. What about customers and suppliers?
K.Z.: Here now comes where good ideas comes from and where the stimulus. We need to know whether we talk about evolutionary or revolutionary innovations. The largest part of innovation is evolutionary part and this is what the customer comes from. You find out what are the customer needs, the customer desire, what the market need and then you tell that to the people and then they will come up with the solutions. This is human trade - people would like to do things better then they did before: easier, cheaper, faster and with more quality etc. So, yes, you need to know the market, the customers. But again this was not 40 years ago, not the case. 40 years ago there was no real market research to try to find out.
As far as revolutionary innovations are concern, there is no market for them. And revolutionaly innovation has to generate the market and I always have an example: the laser. The laser was a revolutionary innovation. It was a new scientific discovery. There was no use for the laser. Today of course you can not do anything what we do today without laser especially in the telecommunication. But it took a long time. So medium size company most of the time can not effort to do the revolutionary innovation to generate the market. It needs to get profit sooner. So for many companies it is evolutionary innovation that is the bottom of what they are doing. Improve things here or improve things there, but this is you find out by talking to your customers.
And adding to the previous question about the steps. In my career I was only involved in the first step: in the research and idea generation. It was only when I finally retired from Siemens, I went to do consulting with Tomas Group, I switched camps and went to the other side and this is where I got all the other sides of the innovation. Ad I just loved it. It is so important, it is so pragmatic, but it is also a disciplined process, which for a guy with a German descent it is a big pleasure to see the methodology and how you can do that. You can show that to the other people and teach them and see that they do it right and it worked.
P.S.: One can read that innovation is the only way to survive for the North American companies and Western European countries in the competition to Chinese. Actually the most recent survey of innovation in the "The Economist" says that there a lot of designed maps in China already and anywhere. So even China and India have their own innovation. Would you agree to saying "Innovate or die"? How this is related to Ukraine?
K.Z.: The first question is easy. The second one is more difficult. The answer to the firs question: first, do I believe or not, I am fully believer of that. I can see three options of cooperation. One is to do nothing. And simply having the same - so you will die. The second one - be surprised by changes that happening but react, that's better than number one, but still puts you to the situation when you follow someone else. For some companies that's good because they decided to be the best number 2 rather then way number 1. They wait until someone else will come with innovation and jump on it early enough to still catch big market share, improve quality, performance and lower the cost sometimes. So there are some companies that are good at that. In general, if you take a look at General Electric, they want to be number 1, number 2 in everything they do, innovation is the real way. You want to be the leader in the business. You want to lead. So I believe this very much.
I'm worried also that what you are saying is correct, in India and China over all Eastern area, they are also working in the front part of idea generation which was for a long time something that America thought that they were only one that were good at that. We still are good at it. But we are loosing out of that also. And one of the big problems here is the educational system. In America we don't educate any more enough people for technological know-how, most people want to go for Wall-Street and earn a lot of money quickly. So the USA produces 20 thousands engineers per year. In China it is like 500 thousands. So the numbers are not equal. So maybe not all Chinese are equally as good as American engineers are. But when you have 500 thousands each year the Bell Curve will certainly tell you there would be some write-offs but that's enough for them. So what's left for America? Because we are not good in manufacturing any more. That part is lost already. This part is outsourced somewhere. So I have my concern about US.
About Ukraine? Ukraine has to pull itself up. Investments are not coming because of lacking of transparency in the legal system. Investors don't want to put a lot of money in here. They might loose it because some court can make mysterious decision. Innovation is not the expense in my mind. Innovation is an investment. It pays off very well in the long run. But initially it requires a lot of investments. We have to generate a new culture for the people to come with new ideas; you need to generate the environment, so you can not look for the profit immediately. First profit to me you will get in the tourism industry, where you invite people and they pay in cash. In industry there is an incubation period. I think first of all industry in Ukraine has to recognize that innovation is number 1, absolutely necessary to survive, grow and make profit. So how do you do innovation? Generate the environment where you get creative people to do that. You do marketing research and today you have to do global market as you were saying before, it is a global world. And then you have to install the process of doing the thing. The disciplined process is getting shorter and shorter because the life time of the product is getting shorter and shorter. My advice is people that want to get into those things ask me how to implement the process and I will tell them.
P.S.: And what is the role of business education?
K.Z.: Princeton has the following idea. We don't have business school; it is too late because there are a lot of good business schools, so they have other goals. But they also realize that most of their students that studied Liberal Arts, Economics, lined up with managerial top positions. At the same time we realize that today's industry is extremely technology dominated. So these people will make decisions concerning technology. But they have not really studied technology. So how do you get managers that did not study technology, how do you get them smart to make technology based decisions? This is what Princeton is trying to do now. We are trying to teach courses that people don't learn fundamentally, but we try to explain the basic principles including innovation entrepreneurship. So right now we have 3 courses in the school of engineering in Princeton where we call it Centre of Education and Engineering innovation. Courses are aimed to broader groups of students to understand how industry works. Industry can only survive when it innovates. So this is what innovation process is all about.
19.02.08
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