Minnesota Technology Magazine - Winter 2006
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4 Questions
Retired Control Data CEO Robert Price on building—and sustaining—a culture of innovation.
Bob Price knows a little something about innovation. During his 40 years in the computer industry, he helped a scrappy upstart business called Control Data Corp. transform itself into a pioneering supercomputer maker. As the company’s CEO during the 1980s, he also directed its strategic move from computer hardware into information and systems integration services. Price, who lives in Burnsville, has written a new book, The Eye for Innovation: Recognizing Possibilities and Managing the Creative Enterprise, that blends a history of Control Data with insights on innovation and its impact on companies and their employees.
1. In a nutshell, what were the core principles that helped Control Data build a culture of innovation?
They revolved around some core characteristics that we built into the company. There are several, but the two most important are awareness and intrinsic motivation. Awareness means managers
are not only aware of technology, but also aware of what kind of problems need to be solved. Awareness requires matching needs with ideas. The other characteristic is motivation. There are two types of motivation. The first is extrinsic, or compensation-related motivation. The second type, intrinsic motivation, is even more important, as it comes from within a person. Companies often lack it because people too often are afraid to take risks and thus fear failure. Both of these characteristics are in people’s minds—that is, they must be turned on in order to solve problems.
2. How do companies sustain the culture of innovation as they grow and evolve?
There are two ways to do it. One is by controlling the size of your business units. It’s easier to sustain the innovation culture in smaller organizations. At Control Data, we had a lot of smaller units focused on particular services and specialized products. We kept the business units as small as possible. The other point to remember is that as a company grows, it has more resources to work with. The challenge is to figure out what a growing company can best do with those additional resources. As Control Data grew, we became aware of more needs—we had more people and were in more places. The additional resources allowed us to apply information technology in many more types of businesses.
3. Why don’t more companies innovate well today?
If you go back 25 years, U.S. companies were losing their global competitive edge. That was during the time when Japanese companies were really riding high. In order to be globally competitive,
U.S. companies had to start focusing on quality and cost. That’s when the movement toward quality control started taking hold in this country. That was important—in fact, we had to do that. But for more than a quarter of a century the attention of U.S. business has been on cost, on the bottom line. We’ve focused on continuous improvement of processes. All good stuff. But the thing is that we now have an entire generation of managers who are focused on quality and cost instead of the top line—new ideas and new services. Really, we’ve got to do both. What’s served us well for the last 25 years needs to be augmented with an increased awareness of the top line of the operating statement—producing those innovative and novel ideas that people will pay for.
4. How can a company build a culture of innovation today?
In my book, I lay down seven principles for innovative companies. The very first is that innovators are made, not born. The things which go into engendering a culture that makes innovators include what we discussed earlier: awareness, motivation, and balancing accountability with reducing the fear of failure.
Innovation always involves risk. From Thomas Edison to Seymour Cray, they all took risks and all had failures before they found success.
—William Gurstelle
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