>> Live from Las Vegas
It's theCUBE covering the AWS Accenture Executive Summit.
Brought to you by Accenture.
>> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage
of the AWS Executive Summit here
at the Venetian in Las Vegas.
I'm your host, Rebecca Knight.
We have two guests for this segment.
We have Mike Moore, Senior Principal at Accenture Research,
and Andrew Wilson, Chief Information Officer at Accenture.
Thank you both so much for returning to theCUBE.
>> Good to see you as ever, Rebecca,
and to be back in Las Vegas as well.
>> Exactly, back in Sin City, right, here we are.
So our topic is innovation.
A buzzword that is so buzzy it's almost boring.
Let's start the conversation
with just defining innovation.
What does innovation mean?
>> An objective, a behavior, a way of working.
To me, innovation is what we need to do
with modern technology to enable the enterprise
and the business world and be creative humans
and to use disciplines which we didn't typically bring
to work before.
>> And is it creativity,
or is there sort of logic and rationale too?
>> I think there's logic and rationale.
But there's also entertainment, fun,
modern consumer-like experimentation,
risk-taking, things of that nature.
>> I think that a big key is actually striking a balance
between creativity and logic and rationale
and that's the really tricky bit,
because you need to give your employees the license
to be creative but within a certain set
of boundaries as well.
>> The rules of work have definitely changed,
and behaviors that we encourage,
even the clothes we wear,
how we work, when we work,
those are all characteristic
of a more innovative, accepting diverse world,
and a world that can keep up with the modern technology
and the advancements and the announcements
like we're hearing about here at re:Invent.
>> It's the ultimate right brain, left brain behavior
and activity.
So Mike, you've done some research recently
about the hallmarks of innovative companies,
what they do differently from the ones
that are not innovative, that are failing here,
so tell our viewers a little bit
about what you've found in your research.
>> We surveyed 840 executives from a variety
of different companies, different industries,
different geographies,
to understand their approach to innovation,
and those who were doing it particularly well,
and those maybe not so well.
And around about 14 percent of our respondents
were turning their investments in innovation
into accelerated growth,
and there were lots of different reasons for their success
but three things really stood out.
So first of all their outcome lacked
in terms of the way they approach innovation,
so they put a clear set of processes
around their innovation activities,
and then linked those to operational
and financial performance metrics.
They're also disruption minded,
so they're not just pursuing incremental tweaks
to their products and services,
but their investing in disruptive technologies
that could actually create entirely new markets.
And then finally they're change orientated.
They're not just using innovation
to change their products and services,
but also to fundamentally change the nature
of their own organizations as a whole.
>> So 14 percent are knocking it out of the park.
Does that mean the rest of them are all laggards
or are sort of some in the middle?
What is the state of innovation
in industry today, would you say, Andrew?
>> I would say it's hugely variable by industry,
geography, type of company, and individual instance
of leader and culture,
but I am sure that the most successful companies,
those that are pivoting to the new,
those that are imaginative,
those that have recently arrived,
all have that DNA that we're describing,
all have that way of working,
all have that ability to operate cleverly, intelligently,
humorously, and at speed.
I think innovation is very much characterized
by something that can be fast-failed,
do, step, move sideways, do again.
The way of working has changed in modern enterprises.
We as CIO's have to accept that.
We have to speed up.
We have to create the environment
in where that productivity,
where that creation can occur,
and I think all of that's key.
>> You keep mentioning this, the way of working has changed,
and I think we all sort of know what you mean
but explain a little bit what you're seeing.
>> Experimentation, the ability
to get more done with the resources that you have.
So here we are at AWS re:Invent,
cloud-based operations.
Cloud gives you, gives me as a CIO
the means to do more, more quickly,
more rapidly, on a greater scale,
in more places that I ever could have imagined
in my old old-fashioned data senses.
So the services we can consume,
the data we can connect together,
the artificial intelligence we can bring to it,
the consumer-like experience.
All of those things, which by the way,
are drawing on innovative behaviors in their own right,
are absolutely what the game is about now.
>> How does AWS figure into your cloud transformation?
>> Well for our cloud transformation at Accenture,
AWS is one of the core cloud platform providers
who power Accenture.
We are nearly 95 percent in cloud.
So as an organization that's very pronounced,
and typically ahead of most organizations.
But we sort of have to be, don't we?
I mean, we have to be our own North Star.
I can't sit here and explain the virtues
of what Accenture can bring
to a client's cloud transformation
if we haven't already done it to ourselves.
And by the way, that drew on innovative approaches,
risk-taking approaches because
over the last three years we've moved Accenture
to the cloud.
>> So I love how you said it,
we are our own North Star,
and other people would say we eat our own dog food,
I mean that's just kind of more gross,
but in terms of having experienced
this transformation yourselves,
how do you use what you've learned
to help your companies transform as well?
And make these moves, take these risks,
what would you say to that?
>> Well I think we keep an eye on the research
with our colleagues there,
they're our own North Star.
I think we look at the ecosystem,
we assess readiness for enterprise,
security compliance, scale, availability,
and then we also look and say,
and what's ready for prime time
in terms of Accenture scale, half a million people nearly.
You bring all of those things together
and it's a recipe,
and that's why we consult our business,
that's why we guide and educate and experiment
and innovate together.
And that's very much how we adopted cloud,
it's very much how we do a number of other things,
and the creative services we have.
>> In terms of, let's get back to the research.
So how do you, I mean as you said, the research is,
as Andrew said, it's something
that executive leaders are looking at
to figure out what's actually happening
in the market as well as
what's happening within the organization itself.
So how do you set your research agenda
in terms of figuring out where you want
to focus your time and energy and resources.
>> Well I think we do it in a very similar way to
in which we consult with clients,
we speak to them.
We talk to them about some of the key issues
that they're facing
and we always interview a series of executives
and also academics to get their perspective
at the start of their project.
And that's something that we did
in this particular instance
and what we heard from many executives was that,
to the point that Andrew was making before,
the speed and scale of innovation today is happening
at a completely different pace than in the past.
So product cycle times are just diminishing
in every single industry and as a consequence,
executives now need to build new innovation units
to make sure that they can respond to that changing market.
So that's we wanted to explore through the research.
>> So in this research, with the 14 percent doing it well,
the 86 percent sort of either,
somewhere on the spectrum of doing terribly
or figuring things out, getting better,
what are their pain points,
and what's your advice to those companies?
>> Well I think, and we take the positive spin on it
in terms of what the companies are doing well,
one of the points that Andrew was making
before was how Accenture works with other partners
to become more innovative itself.
And that's something that we saw many
of the high performing companies doing.
So many of them were what we call networks powers.
Not just innovating using their own resources,
their own people,
but their drawing on a broader ecosystem of partners
to bring the very best products and services
to their customers,
and their spending not just on R and D internally
but also on accelerators, incubators,
technology based M and A,
and actually their spending as much
on inorganic innovation as they are on organic innovation.
>> At Accenture we actually help our clients look
for trap value,
and what we mean by that is
if an organization with a history,
with a set of business processes,
a set of technologies, and a set of disciplines
and employees that have been successful
and worked possibly for decades in that model,
then they're going to be in some pretty tight guide rails.
How do you innovate out of that,
to deal with all of the destruction that's now available,
good healthy disruption,
that actually reveals the next level of efficiency,
customer satisfaction, product creativity,
and innovation in it's own right,
so that's innovation in action, if you like.
>> I want to ask, here we are at AWS re:Invent,
Andy Jassy on the main stage this morning
announcing a dizzying number
of new products, services,
and AWS, this is Amazon,
this is a huge company that really seems
to know how to innovate,
and do it constantly,
but is that is that, can every company be Amazon?
You know what I'm saying?
I mean, is this really possible and attainable?
>> Is such a thing as innovation fatigue perhaps?
>> Well, exactly, right!
>> My view is that you have to find a way
to make innovation a constant and a norm.
It doesn't mean that you always will have
to operate with the same ridiculous pace,
but creativity and pace do go hand in hand to a point,
but to be ahead, to stay ahead,
and to lead an organization of technologists,
who can comprehend all of these announcements,
so you have to innovate
in both how you lead and operate as well.
It's not just your product, it's your behaviors,
because there's just so much coming all the time.
>> Right, and we've seen a number of large companies,
not necessarily technology companies,
but I'm thinking of Sears and Toys-R-Us,
that have really, you've seen what can happen,
the cautionary tales.
>> Look at the attrition in the Fortune 500,
and you can see how companies have a, a half life now,
which perhaps is very different to 20 or 30 years ago.
>> Right, right, exactly.
Well, Mike and Andrew,
thank you so much for coming on theCUBE.
This was a really fascinating discussion.
>> Thanks.
>> Thank you, good to see you again.
>> I'm Rebecca Knight,
stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage
of the AWS Executive Summit.
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