NEW YORK CITY – Intuit Inc. held its Innovation Gallery Walk tour yesterday where the business and financial management solutions vendor showcased its latest products and innovations.
Kris Halvorsen, Intuit’s senior vice-president and chief innovation officer, was on hand at the event, where CDN Now had the chance to speak with him about what innovation really means, how the process works, how it can be measured and what the company’s most interested in right now.
Below is an edited transcript of the conversation.
CDN Now: We hear a lot of companies using the word innovation. Can you define the term and what it means to Intuit?
Kris Halvorsen: Innovation is a word that seems overused but the reality is that today, many companies are putting more of an effort into innovation. I’m from Norway and there, innovation means new thinking. For a company or anyone to do well and be successful, they have to think fresh. There’s nothing mysterious around innovation, other than you need to be effective and improve somehow. Especially in a down economy, you have to apply yourself with new thoughts. On the other hand when tremendous growth and changes in technology happens, you’ll always have to realize options and new ways to solve problems you couldn’t before.
CDN Now: What exactly does a chief innovation officer do?
K.H.: The purpose of my role is to look out ahead and identify the technologies that are likely to be transformational for our customers and to see how we can solve customer problems through innovation for instance with mobility, data analytics and new user interaction methods.
CDN Now: How does the innovation process work?
K.H.: For innovation, to bring ideas into products, you have to have a process and infrastructure in the company that allows people to adopt, experiment and launch the idea into a product. It’s about enabling the grassroots of the company to try new things and to get them tested out quickly and to make sure decision mechanisms are in place to allow experimentation to happen. Innovation is really everyone’s job, but we have a team in Intuit that we call innovation catalysts. They’re responsible for looking for and identifying technology trends. We also have a team of designers that take those innovations and turn them into shape.
CDN Now: How long does the innovation process actually take?
K.H.: It should be between months and a very small number of years for innovation to be executed. We’re not inventing a new technology but instead, we’re identifying the technology that’s new to Intuit but is already out there and ready for adoption.
CDN Now: Can innovation be measured, and if so, how?
K.H.: One of the most important ways of measuring innovation is figuring out if we are releasing new offerings that delight our customers. One of the reasons why we put so much emphasis on enabling innovation at Intuit with processes and technology is because when we measured our new product introductions in the mid-2000s, we thought we could do better than we had with the number of new products that were introduced. For measuring, we also look at customer satisfaction and the revenue that we’re able to generate from these new offerings. We also look at idea generation by looking at the number of ideas and the number of teams that move innovation from the gestation stage to a number of funded projects.
CDN Now: What are the current and emerging innovations you’re seeing in the market today and how will they influences Intuit’s future direction?
K.H.: In the case of mobility, we have our SnapTax mobile application that lets users file their tax returns without having to enter their data because they can use their smartphones to take a photo and import information. When it comes to new interaction technologies, we’re able to use things like image processing to take away the need to have to type in data. In terms of the future, we see opportunities for the use of practical forms of artificial intelligence. This would eliminate the need to spend time entering data and making decisions. All of these things can be supported by the right kind of intelligence and automation and decisions could be made based on the vast amount of data that’s available.
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