Fostering Innovation at the Corporate Level | Big Think

Fostering Innovation at the Corporate Level

New videos DAILY

Join Big Think Edge for exclusive videos

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Will Swope details the essential role that innovation plays at Intel and how he manages it effectively.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

William A. Swope:

William A. Swope is corporate vice president and general manager of Intel's Corporate Sustainability Group. In this role, he is responsible for driving Intel's environmental efforts in the areas of policy, operations and products. Swope works with stakeholders across the company to ensure that Intel continues to build upon its industry leadership in sustainability.

Since joining Intel in 1979, Swope has held numerous roles including corporate affairs leadership, manufacturing technology planning, strategic product planning and product management. Swope was director of Digital Enterprise Brand Management, and prior to that he was general manager of the Software and Solutions Group (SSG), reporting to the president and chief operating officer of Intel. In that capacity he managed the software products and enabling efforts within SSG. From 1993 to 1995, Swope was the general manager of the Intel® Pentium® Pro processor team. Swope was promoted to vice president in 1996 and corporate vice president in 2003.

Swope received his bachelor's degree in applied physics from Tufts College. He earned his master's degree in management from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSCRIPT:

Question: How do you create an innovative company environment?

Swope: The way we talk about it is informed risk-taking, right. Informed risk-taking in that culture is fundamental towards supporting innovation and [to do that] there got to be an educated population. If you’re working on something that you don’t quite understand, the probability of making it better by messing with it is reduced. So, just think about those two tenets for a while, a culture that supports it, and then number 2 then enough education and knowledge and teamwork to be able to go build it. There are a very few individuals any more that can understand one of our products and [sold] them half over billion transistors. It is hard to know what each one of them does, right. So, there are teams of people that create this and there are bigger teams of people that try to, you know, validate them and distribute them, etc. So if I were thinking about the third thing, it would be about building that culture of teamwork and allowing teams then be innovative.

Question: How do you allow for experiments in innovation?

Swope: At the Intel Fellow level, the top, the very top, approximately 100 scientists and technologists that we have, we told them they’re going to have half the time to themselves and they can go work on that. Very few of them actually take us up on that, but the offer is genuine. Now, it means in some area that they have some expertise, all right. We actually haven’t really faced a lot of that difficulty because our products are so incredibly complex, beautifully complex, one can argue, and because there’s so much change that goes on all the time. So, if you are interested in the field of computing, working for Intel is like just a great place to be, right? And they have the tendency to work in that area. Now, we try to go off and then there’s a pretty formal process for determining in the R&D labs what technologies still hold promise and when to kind of reduce the funding in an area and when to move it forward. So we have a lot of process, Intel is a process [storing] company. We have a lot of processes to do that. But, fundamentally, the idea is that you can do most of the development in the area of expertise at some form of computing, and then in the research labs themselves, a very organized process to determine which ones we continue to fund and which ones we pass on.

Question: What’s the foundation of an innovative corporate environment?

Swope: Well, the first one I had as tenets are the culture would be first. You have to respect that and that means it doesn’t always work. The second one is education. We talked about that. See if there’s a third one. Oh, I think the third one is, really, you have to just feel eminently wonderful about the success. So, if you step back and say, okay, you’re allowed to fail and then people are educated. Then, do you really celebrate those people that can move it forward and sometimes the team moves it forward and then sometimes, you know, just one person makes a difference.

Read the full transcript at