5 ways to build innovation cultures at work, according to Hewlett Packard Enterprise's CTO

Nearly 80% of companies rank innovation among their top three priorities. And those who promote a culture of innovation, embracing risks, fostering collaboration, and granting autonomy to their teams – are 60% more likely to be innovation leaders. This is according to research by Boston Consulting Group (BCG).

But how do you build an innovation culture as a business? Who better to ask than Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE). Meet the Leader’s Linda Lacina talked to Fidelma Russo, CTO at HPE about her five top tips for creating an innovation culture.

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When money gets tight, innovation budgets often get curtailed. Instead, management consultants BCG say, companies should embrace innovation even in challenging times.

This means making room for experimentation and allocating adequate budgets to it.

Fidelma Russo recommends that about 10% of the R&D budget should be allocated to experimentation.

“That seems like a lot, but there's always money in everybody's budget that's being spent on what I would call sedimentation,” she says, advocating for leaders to find ways to ring fence those budgets.

“If we don't find that money and use it to do things that may be something of a moonshot, or a crazy idea, then you're not allowing your team to think outside the box enough. And you’re going to miss an opportunity.”

Making plans and projections is important for businesses, but Russo says in technology there must always be space for flexibility.

“The yearly planning cycle is actually somewhat stifling, because in technology, cycles tend not to align with yearly planning cycles,” she explains. “They don't care about our calendars, they don't care about our budget cycles.”

She gives the example of generative AI which has seen rapid development in recent years. Rather than holding out for the next planning cycle, HPE teams were encouraged to explore the benefits of AI in their work immediately, accelerating traditional processes and product trajectories as a result.

Russo also points to the importance of HPE’s conferences, such as HPE Tech Con, because of their ability to overcome departmental silos and to bring in external perspectives.

“The best thing about this event is that it brings together people across the company. In a company like Hewlett-Packard, even though it's a massive company with 60,000 people, you end up working with a very small set of people. So, an event like this breaks down those silos and barriers.”

Russo names developments such as liquid cooling, blade servers and hybrid cloud innovations as outcomes of past HPE Tech Con events.

Another critical aspect of the company’s tech conferences is bringing an outside perspective to engineering and product design teams.

“That is incredibly important these days, especially as product cycles get shorter and shorter. We are continuously trying to ensure that our engineers are much more exposed to the use cases that our customers are seeing and that we co-innovate with customers,” Russo explains.

“We are lucky to have customers who want to do that with us, and find places where we can test it out together at their sites.”

Young engineers and technical staff are another group Russo wants to encourage to overcome silos and build their internal professional networks early on.

“We're encouraging them to submit papers and we also have nominations to bring our young talent to these events, so that they can mingle and get mentorship from talent that's been around the block a while.

“It's really critical that they start to form networks and collaborate across the company. This creates a much more dynamic organization.”

In essence, the key to an innovation culture, according to Fidelma Russo, is in establishing a well-connected ecosystem of people both within and outside of the organization, staying agile to take new developments on board and ensuring innovation continues to be funded even against a background of continued uncertainty.