The value of innovation culture: a conversation with Top 100 Global Innovators

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Erin Byrne: You need a reason, a purpose to go and invent, sometimes, and I think this pandemic and the needs of our customers and the needs for more bandwidth and communication tools was an enormous provocation for us to speed up.

Ed White: Consistent innovation culture, solving not just one problem, but thousands and thousands of problems, is a very powerful indicator of a company’s long-term success and value.

Catherine Maresh: In collaborating with our customers, we’re exposed to other approaches, views, and perceptions, so we are just faster the next time around.

Announcer: The Ideas to Innovation podcast from Clarivate.

Joan Walker: Hello, I’m Joan Walker, and welcome to the Ideas to Innovation podcast. In this brand new series, we’ll be talking to the people who live and breathe the process of turning ideas into innovation. The smartphones and technologies that we depend on, the medicines that we rely on, the electricity that powers our day-to-day life, they were all once ideas before becoming inventions, inventions that have changed our lives for the better.

Join the conversation with experts and industry leaders to discuss innovation at its core. Now, every year since 2012, Clarivate identifies the top 100 global innovators. These are companies and institutions at the pinnacle of the global innovation landscape that have contributed new ideas, solved some of the world’s most complex challenges, and created new value.

Today, guests from 3 of those 100 companies and institutions join us to talk about the value of innovation culture, and how businesses today go about creating and sustaining an innovative company. Looking at the world and the times that we are living in, we’ll be asking our guests how innovation is helping us overcome the pandemic to deliver green shoots of recovery.

Joining us today, are Catherine Maresh, vice president and chief intellectual property counsel at Immersion. Elizabeth McCombs, executive vice president, and chief technology officer at BD. Erin Byrne, vice president and chief technology officer for data and devices at TE Connectivity, and Ed White, head of analytics for the IP group at Clarivate. Hello there, everybody.

Erin: Hello.

Ed: Hello.

Catherine: Hello.

Elizabeth: Hello.

Joan: Hello, hello one and all. We’ve all been locked up, locked down, locked in. I just wonder what everybody’s been watching.

Ed: Well, Joan, there’s been some discovery of certain shows on Netflix or Amazon Prime. I can’t quite remember. Westworld was me and my wife’s favorite for the last 12 months.

Joan: Did you binge-watch?

Ed: We did, and it’s always that point of, “It’s gone midnight. Do we watch another one?” That’s always the question, right?

Joan: Absolutely. No, I hear that. Catherine, did you watch anything that really tickled your taste buds?

Catherine: Well, I went back down memory lane and watched reruns of the TV show Emergency that I loved when I was a child. It was about the paramedics and their interactions day-to-day, and it’s been fun watching the reruns.

Joan: Oh. Elizabeth, how about you?

Elizabeth: During the pandemic, we binge-watched The Great British Baking Show. My 10-year-old son now does impressions of Paul Hollywood, and we actually call whipped cream Chantilly now. So, we’ve picked up some of the culture from The Great British Baking Show.

Joan: Oh, wonderful. Has it made you all really great home bakers?

Elizabeth: No, we just like to watch it. We still buy our pies at the store. [laughs]

Joan: Erin, how about you?

Erin: My husband controls the television in our house, and I do tend to try to avoid binge-watching, although when the pandemic hit, we did both share a big rerun of Frasier, the sitcom from the ’90s here in the US. I do like the lighthearted stuff, so I’m willing to take a break and laugh, and I was reminded how great of a show that was, how tight the cast was, and such. That was a lot of fun.

Joan: I’d have to say, I do love Frasier, some of the physicality, the one where Niles on Valentine’s Day, manages to set light to his own trousers. Well, I am delighted to have you all as my playmates on this. Can I just say congratulations, Catherine, Elizabeth, and Erin, as your companies have been named top 100 global innovators this year?

Erin: Thank you very much.

Joan: Thank you.

Catherine: Thank you.

Joan: Now, I would love to hear you tell us a little bit more about yourself, how you started out, and if you have any words of advice that will encourage and inspire the new generation of aspiring innovators. Let’s face it, we’re living through very challenging times where prospects for young people just coming into the workforce are tough. Catherine, let’s start with you. Tell us how you started out in this industry.

Catherine: We’ll have to first go back to my engineering school and undergraduate. I chose an engineering degree. My parents always encouraged my curiosity, the desire to learn and explore, and in engineering, problem-solving is core, and it’s a mix of exploration, innovation, solution, and implementation. Then I went off to law school, became a patent lawyer, and this allowed me to interact with many different innovators, with many different technologies on a global basis, from Europe to North America, to Asia.

As a patent attorney, I help affirm the value and recognition of their innovations to the world, their businesses, and their peers. I love being at this intersection where innovators and business meet. Now, I’m in Immersion, a company that has positioned itself to innovate where people and digital devices meet. As for advice, I think what I might advise two of my nieces that are in engineering, the key is to be open to opportunities and be adaptable. People will ask where you want to be in 1, 5, 10 years. It’s good to have a general idea, but the path may vary, and that’s also common in innovation. It all goes back to problem-solving, defining the problem, and being open on how to solve it.

Joan: Well, that sounds like sound advice to me. Elizabeth, over to you.

Elizabeth: Sure. My father is an engineer, my mother is a nurse, so my career choice as an engineer in medical technology was really a natural combination of the two. I had a strong interest and talent for math and science, and I knew early on that I wanted to work in a field where I could have a positive impact on people. My first job was really a dream job, as a design engineer, designing devices for breast cancer diagnostics.

I was really intrigued by that opportunity to work on a women’s health product line very early on, and also fortunate to work with so many talented and dedicated people who really shared my passion for patient impact, and taught me what it meant to be an engineer, and just the importance of reliability and quality and rigor as we think about a patient at the end of every device that we make.

If I think about the next generation of innovators, I welcome you and encourage you to take on big problems. We still have big problems to solve, whether it’s in health care, energy, transportation, environment, exploration of space, there’s just so much potential. Every once in a while, I just take a moment to reflect on how innovators, the products and solutions that we create, touch thousands, maybe millions of lives of people we never will meet.

Throughout my career, I’ve personally met just a handful of patients who actually benefited directly from a medical device that I helped to develop, and those moments are just incredible, really, to hear those stories of impact, just reinforces my passion and my perseverance to take on difficult clinical problems, and find better solutions that will advance human health. Very inspired by that impact, and I know the next generation of innovators will have even more impact.

Joan: As you say, when you realize the lives that you’re actually touching, countless.

Elizabeth: Exactly.

Joan: Erin, how did your career begin?

Erin: I’m a scientist by training. I did a PhD in chemistry, and I love pretty colors. I love to sit at the bench and create new molecules and characterize them and understand the world better at the micro-level. When I got my degree, I had an opportunity to join AT&T Bell Labs, which was one of the premier research institutions at the time. It was a fantastic opportunity, but it was a big shift in that my first role was as a process development engineer doing chemical vapor deposition for semiconductor lasers, and these lasers were used for fiber optic communications.

So, I had to learn all about fiber optics, new systems, this chemical vapor deposition process that I wasn’t familiar with. That started me on a track and really my career path of discovery and new roles. I became a manager after about five years and went through all the different engineering roles in manufacturing, and then decided to go into commercial roles because I wanted to get closer to customers.

I spent about 10 years in various commercial roles, including running a small startup for an optical sensing device. I’ve really explored a number of different industry verticals, but the theme has really been commercializing bleeding edge technology. As I came to TE about 10 years ago, I entered in an advanced development role in one of our business units, and I’ve had four roles at TE since then. This personal growth has coincided with driving business growth. I would say, advice to new innovators is really explore and figure out how to add value and connect the dots. If you learn how to learn, you will prepare for the problems of tomorrow, which I don’t think any of us can predict today.

Joan: Sure. That is very sound advice, that explore, and learn how to learn. Ed, last but really not least, can you tell us your story and how you began?

Ed: Sure. I started out as an electronic engineering graduate in the editorial department here at Clarivate, 20 years ago, where my first job was to abstract and index patent documents, 70 of them a day. I was working in a specific department that covered measurement and test technologies, and plasma and electron beam physics. Somewhat similar to Erin in that semiconductor fabrication space. I got into the world of patent information at the ground floor.

After a few years doing that, I moved into our consulting group, working with our customers directly, where I conducted many, many patent research projects for our customers, where we would help them directly navigate complex technical change. Today, I head up that group, and one of our responsibilities is the top 100 program, where I am the author of the report and have the privilege of leading the overall direction of that program.

My advice, Joan, I guess, my first love is science and engineering, but my dad gave me a really good piece of advice when I was selecting my A levels, which is the last examination that you have here in the UK. What he said was, “No matter how technical you go, always make sure that you study something every semester that forces you to write an essay.” The reason he wanted that, and still that was that writing, communicating is a skill. If you know the tech and can talk about it, that’s really something that’s going to pay off over and over again. That’s definitely been something true in my career.

Joan: That’s extraordinary advice, isn’t it, actually? Always find something that makes you write an essay.

Ed: It’s true. It doesn’t need to be something even particularly apt to science and engineering. I did modules on psychology and management theory and economics. Whilst those subjects are incredibly interesting, what they’re doing is forcing you to formulate an argument and a case.

Joan: Yes, yes, indeed. Now, Ed, staying with you, can we get to the heart of it and talk about the top 100 Global innovators program, if you could tell us a bit more?

Ed: Well, we are now in our 10th year of honoring companies that show consistent innovation and excellence above their peers, companies like BD, Immersion, and TE. The ethos of the top 100 Global innovators and for Clarivate as a whole is rooted in advancing innovation. Through the top 100 program, we get to celebrate those organizations that do sit right at the very top of this global innovation ecosystem, those that are literally creating new economic value and new wealth through solving technical problems in our society.

There is, as you would understand, quite a bit to the methodology but essentially, we track innovation based on four indicators. We use volume of output as a starting qualifier, and then rankings around comparative influence of the research, the success of patent applications, and the global footprint of each company’s patented inventions, using our market-leading and uniquely structured patent data from Derwent.

Our goal with all of this is to shift from simple measures of patents to a more sophisticated view that measures outcomes in comparison to others, so that we can get a measure of the ideation culture or the intellectual muscle that produced those patents. There’s a fair bit of number crunching and expert analysis, as you can imagine, but what this process does is it moves us from a baseline of more than 14,000 qualifying organizations down to our list of top 100.

Joan: Ed, obviously, this top 100 list, it doesn’t sound like something that you could come up with overnight, a huge amount of work. Can you talk us through how the process actually works?

Ed: Sure, you’re right, Joan, it is work. It is quite a bit of work, but it’s also a hugely enjoyable team effort. It involves lots of different people right across Clarivate from the analytics teams that I head up, our business leaders, our marketing teams, our creative design teams, and, of course, our data and content teams. Top 100 is many months in the making. Just to give you an idea, we are already deep in planning for next year’s program, which is due to publish in February 2022.

My role is really just the tip of the spear. One of the things that our CEO Jerry Stead is fond of saying is, “Work should be play with a purpose.” Top 100 truly is that for us, it’s an awful lot of fun with a really wonderful team. This year, as it was the 10th year, we spent some time focusing on the companies that have appeared in our top 100 list every single year since 2012. These are our old-timers, as we’ve come to calling them.

We did things like researching the foundational stories of these companies and uncovered some really interesting and enlightening nuggets about their histories. Many of which have, frankly, very strong echoes from a century or more ago with innovation trends that we see and feel today. For the first time, we also did something where we measured the corporate value impact of consistent above-the-bar innovation. The output from all of this, the stories that we’re able to tell, and the response from our top 100 recipients, really make it totally worth it. You could say that the top 100 Global Innovators is the Oscars or the BAFTAs for innovation.

Joan: Clearly Oscars, BAFTAs, being named a top 100 Global Innovator is a huge honor, then.

Ed: Yes, it’s a difficult club to be in. It’s a difficult club to stay in. Yes, we would very much hope so.

Joan: Now, Catherine, and Elizabeth, how important is it that Immersion and BD are a top 100 global innovator? In the case of BD appearing six times.

Catherine: Being recognized a Global 100 innovator is very, very important. Innovation is core to Immersion, and to have someone outside of our organization recognize and honor our innovation more than once, is something we are very proud of. Being recognized also affirms that our innovation is successful. We’ve celebrated and shared this internally with our employees and our customers.

I also want to add that this encourages our innovation at this intersection of people and digital devices, so our employees still feel encouraged to continue to ask why, and how to break down the boundaries to the digital world. I want to add one last thing is, our presence on this list, I hope inspires other companies to ask the why, the how, and they, someday, might make this list too.

Joan: Yes, indeed. I can completely hear from what you’re saying that it’s the recognition of the hard work that goes on for a very long time, and sometimes completely unseen and uncelebrated, but when it results in this recognition as being a global innovator, that must make it all worthwhile, and then encourage people to keep on doing what they’re doing.

Catherine: We must be doing something right.

Joan: Exactly that, you must be doing something right. Now, Elizabeth, may I invite you to tell me how important being a member of this fabulous club is to you?

Elizabeth: Sure. Clarivate’s recognition of BD as a top 100 innovator, and also a top 10 innovator in our industry, is really great validation of the focus that BD places on innovation at the highest level, and also the amazing creativity and dedication of our 6,000 R&D scientists and engineers, who really put their hearts and souls into developing solutions each day that will really advance human health. Ed shared the methodology that Clarivate uses to really select this elite group.

I find the methodology to be quite sophisticated, it’s looking at both quantity, but also quality. How many times has a particular patent been referenced by other innovators? That really shows the impact that it’s having in the overall space of healthcare. Looking at that economic impact and that quantity, and quality, are all very important to us. This recognition, really, I think, indicates that we’re developing intellectual property and innovation that maximizes our impact. Of course, earning this spot now for six years in a row, it really demonstrates how embedded innovation is in BD’s culture and how we continuously thrive to improve and innovate year after year.

Joan: Well, huge congratulations.

Elizabeth: Thank you.

Joan: Now, Erin, as I understand it, TE is among the 29 companies to be featured for 10 straight years. That’s remarkable. Now, how is this achievement acknowledged and celebrated within TE?

Erin: Well, certainly, TE, we’re honored to be appearing in the Clarivate top 100 list for 10 years. We do feel that it’s a sign of the innovation culture that we’ve established at the company. We see innovation as one of our core values that we celebrate all the time at TE. In the past years, as we’ve made the Clarivate top 100 list, we do share it very broadly, internally and externally, in our social media presence, we talk about it in meetings, we highlight it in our internal myTE portal. So everyone becomes aware that we’ve achieved this honor, and that’s happened year after year, and we carry that forward.

Again, we use it to underpin the fact that innovation is one of our core values. In fact, we celebrate innovation in many ways. We have quarterly innovation awards, and then those lead into an annual, what we call tech con or TE technical conference. That serves to honor our innovators, and we also use it as a way to share best practices and ideas across this vast global enterprise we have. We invite our top several hundred engineers to come together, usually live, except for the last year, to celebrate TE as an innovator and underpin this ongoing value that we share within our company.

Jane: Thank you for that. Thank you, Erin. Just in terms of, as you say, celebrating and sharing that recognition, that must have been quite tricky over the last year or 14 months. Can you describe to me how that celebration or the recognition has been shared?

Erin: Sure. It’s been an interesting experience, because one of the highlights of many of our engineers, and certainly for me, when I joined TE, was actually being able to travel to a nice place to meet together with my fellow colleagues and engineers across the company, and learn more about what was happening more broadly. We rotate our tech-con through the regions every year.

One year in North America, one year in Asia, one year in EMEA, and last year, of course, with all the lockdowns, we created a virtual innovation summit, where, in a few months, several of our team came together and created an agenda, invited outside speakers, talked about what each of our BUs was doing in a short period of time, probably two hours a day for four days in a week, we created an innovation week, and we had our own celebration online, and we made the best of it.

We shared a lot of our stories that had sustained us through the year, and some of the really awesome innovations, and things that people had overcome in the prior year. We’ll be virtual again this year, in fact, so we’re taking a leaf from last year, and improving on that. I suspect in future, it will allow us to reach a broader audience. We’ll share beyond engineering, we’ll have a live and a virtual event going forward, we’re always improving.

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Announcer: The Ideas To Innovation podcast from Clarivate.

Jane: Thank you all for that input. Now, if we can just take a step back and look at the bigger picture, obviously the pandemic continues to dominate a lot of our conversations, whether it’s in business, social, or personal. Innovation clearly matters as, without it, we wouldn’t have the COVID vaccines, we wouldn’t have COVID tests, we wouldn’t have test and trace apps, but surely, innovation is tougher in a crisis, but the opposite seems to be true, as innovation is clearly thriving, and we have this amazing achievement of vaccines being developed and approved in record time. Ed, why don’t you kick us off?

Ed: Yes. Joan, if you think about it at a wider global or system level, innovation is largely defined by “difficult times” in inverted commas. Change, new thinking, the need for a new solution, it happens in response to a challenge, a problem, a gap, or a market opportunity. I think everyone has felt COVID in the last 12-14 months generally has accelerated pressures and challenges, not just the medical response, but things like remote working, and of course, the fairly hefty economic pressure that many, many industries are feeling right now.

That has corresponded into a much faster pace for change, enabled by new ideas and new technical solutions, faster innovation, quicker time to market, get it out the door as quickly as possible, that’s been the most common call that we’ve heard here at Clarivate over the last year. Specific to COVID, 12 months into the pandemic, I think it’s pretty awesome that we’ve defied the odds with not just one COVID vaccine, but many. That speaks to the inherent societal strength innovators provide, that they give to us that existed prior to COVID, even when it wasn’t so front of mind, but it was there for us when we needed it.

On a different perspective, remote working, there’s a brilliantly interesting data point that we’ve come across, remote working has really come in the face of the need for collaboration. One of the statistics that we’ve tracked is that the number of inventors that we see listed on patent applications and patents from our top 100, consistently goes up every year.

Now it’s just under three inventors per invention. Essentially, what that says is that the amount of intellectual muscle that I was talking about before, that’s needed to innovate today, is much higher than it was 10 or even 5 years ago. That speaks to a strong need inside organizations to enable idea collaboration for researchers to work together, as well as the fact that innovating in the 2020s is very much a cross-disciplinary team effort. There’s a very interesting interplay there with the fact that everybody left the office in March 2020.

Jane: Thanks for that, Ed. Now I’d love to hear what Catherine, Elizabeth, and Erin have to say on this. Let’s start with you, Erin.

Erin: Sure. I work in the communications industry. As part of my role at TE, our products actually enable a lot of the communications tools and applications that we’re now relying on to conduct business and live our everyday lives now. The industry is actually moving faster than ever to supply bandwidth for all of these online behaviors that we’ve migrated toward. It’s done an enormous acceleration toward the future.

We’ve been working to work beyond our traditional customers to include other, what we call fellow travelers in our ecosystem. For example, semiconductor partners whose products are paired with our products in order to create the systems that our customers supply. We’ve done virtual customer audits. We have a lot of our customers come to our factory via video in order to let them know that we’re able to produce their product, and it meets their requirements, and such. We’ve had to adapt and to work with these fellow travelers with urgency in order to enable this vast expansion of bandwidth that we’ve all seen.

Jane: Extraordinary, because working at such speed, don’t you find yourself thinking, “Well, why don’t we work like this all the time? Why is it taking this pandemic to make us work at this super quick pace?”

Erin: We were always pretty fast, to begin with, so that part, we did accelerate even more and by the fact that we could all be at home, we removed our commute times and other ways that we, maybe weren’t being productive before. Even when we want to create brainstorming sessions, or know that we need some innovation, I do think we need provocations and we call them specifically provocations at TE in order to create innovations because you need a reason, a purpose to go and invent sometimes. I think this pandemic and the needs of our customers, and the needs for more bandwidth and communication tools by the world was an enormous provocation for us to speed up.

Jane: Yes. Certainly was a huge provocation. [chuckles] Catherine, how about you? How did this provocation challenge your company, Catherine?

Catherine: We accelerated new forms of customer interaction. We had to, and the customers are receptive to that because everyone has been affected by the pandemic, but looking at the collaboration, the greater question about collaboration, Immersion’s positioned at this intersection of human and digital technology, and it’s applicable to gaming companies, automotive companies, smartphone makers. So, it’s only natural that we partner with the others to contribute to this intersection.

This fits our innovation process very well, and since everyone’s home, [chuckles] let’s focus on this and they will still want to build great products for their users. Probably partnering with them, we can help them perfect how haptics work on their devices. They can go to market faster with high-quality products. If anything, this has accelerated our collaboration with our customers. When they understand the value of this collaboration, there’s a greater interest.

I also want to add that this allows for more diversity in the innovation process. In collaborating with our customers, we’re exposed to other approaches, views, and perceptions, so we are just faster the next time around, or we have a new insight. There’s the innovation that occurs in your processes and how you approach problem-solving too. It just builds from there.

Jane: Excellent. Elizabeth, is there something that you would like to add to this?

Elizabeth: Sure. I fully agree with Ed and Erin that the COVID pandemic has significantly increased the pace of innovation. We’ve certainly seen that at BD. There’s just so much urgent need that’s helped us focus our innovation on what really matters. Just one example of this is the development of our Veritor COVID-19 diagnostic test, which is a reliable rapid point of care test system that we developed in record time. I had to check with the team twice to confirm, but it was 14 weeks from kickoff to launch, which is fast in our industry.

Just a few highlights of how that happened, the Veritor cross-functional team, where we have scientists, engineers, physicians, commercial leaders, all worked together, and really had breakthrough thinking of “We’re not going to do business as usual.” There was very strong collaboration that allowed us to very quickly screen and select the right antibodies for the test, to expedite our clinical trials, and to achieve manufacturing scale so we could get to the point of millions of units per month that we could supply, right when the world needed it most.

Joan: Well, thanks for that. Now, can I ask you all, do you think the process of innovation has changed for good because of the pandemic?

Erin: I’ll jump in. I think that we’ve all learned to focus on what really matters. That does change how you go about innovation. Maybe you get a lot more clear about what the problem really is that you’re trying to solve. I think once you get clear about the problem you’re trying to solve, you can really invite a lot of different kinds of solutions. You can open up the lens to solving it in different ways. I would say being clear about where you’re going can really change the process of how you get there.

Joan: Yes, yes. Obviously, because people were working against the clock, and as Elizabeth just said, in record time, to produce these vaccines, do you think that level and the pace of working has really changed things in a way that people are going to see that as the norm? Because we did that in such and such a time, surely, we can now apply that level of innovation and pace to whatever the next big challenge is?

Erin: I do think that, and we do build on that, and that’s how we speed up in our industry. So, the previous record becomes the norm for the next generation.

Joan: Yes, that’s what I think.

Erin: The other thing I would say is the time can be used to actually simplify the innovation process. I use time-bounding to throw away options that won’t meet the schedule. I think it simplifies things a great deal when you can get clarity around, “You have time to do this, and not time to do that, and therefore, this is the direction we’ll go.”

Joan: Yes.

Elizabeth: This is Beth. Just building on that, I completely agree with what Erin said, I think having that clear purpose and need, and driving that sense of urgency, really enables innovation. What we’re seeing across BD is the opportunity to really prioritize the bigger, more differentiated ideas. We tend to want to do many things simultaneously, but if we can really choose what matters, and drive that with full focus and urgency, and full teams that are committed, then that’s really where these breakthroughs are possible. It is, of course, being very intimate with the customers. I think we’ve talked about this so far.

One of the challenges we face is not being able to be with our customers. A lot of our technologies are very hands-on where you need to be with healthcare providers, and working through what the right workflow is, what the right solution is. During the pandemic, we’ve really accelerated some work around virtual reality and simulations that we could actually do virtually and not need to be there in the hospital or in the operating room. There’s still a long way to go here, but I do think the opportunity for more diverse input and to be able to get more of that feedback globally with some of these tools, is promising and something that we can develop into the future.

Joan: Oh, yes, that’s an interesting point. I was going to ask. How would you all suggest that we encourage the constant desire for new ideas and improvement? As you said, Erin, that this new speed becomes the norm. How do you keep that desire to keep moving on?

Catherine: Well, I think the fundamentals are always there. What’s the how and the why? You have that innate sense of curiosity, process, and bringing in those different perspectives, it’s always interactive and if you consider this core mission and value, then it’s going to continue.

Joan: Yes, absolutely. It’s not going to grind to a halt, is it?

Elizabeth: I was just going to build on that. From having that as a core value. At BD, we have a core value that we thrive on innovation and we demand quality. I think having that statement from the top of the house really indicates how important innovation is. We’re also doing a lot of work around our culture and building a growth mindset. The idea that you try hard things, sometimes you stumble, you learn from that failure, but you’re always seeking to learn and improve, is really the hallmark of innovation.

Finally, very focused on inclusion and diversity, which, to me, is foundational to innovation. We’ve done a lot of work around looking at what percent of our innovation is coming from women, or underrepresented minorities, or early in career talent, who may have very different perspectives, and really encouraging them to come into the innovation and submit new ideas, and really being a part of creating that future together.

Joan: Absolutely.

Ed: Erin. On that point, one of the things that’s been discussed before is, of course, that with remote working, a lot of the previous barriers to a lot of diverse thinking being involved in the process has been taken away. That’s been a huge plus over the last year.

Erin: Yes, absolutely. The fact that we’re all on the even playing field here, we’re all working in a remote office, it’s refreshing in a certain way. Of course, we’re all still challenged by time zones, but other than that, we’re all casually seeing our kids or our dogs or whatever, and sharing that, and I think it brings our teams closer together. We can also source ideas from more spots.

We’re encouraging people to share their ideas in different ways in different channels. As Beth said, innovation, and inclusion, and diversity are intimately related. We want to source the best ideas, we want people to feel comfortable sharing those ideas and have them feel free to share them. They’re very unique perspectives. The more perspectives and the more diversity of ideas we have, the better solutions we’re going to come up with.

Joan: Is this something you’re seeing happening especially in the past year or so? Is this collaboration trend and the sharing of ideas something you’d say you were more aware of?

Erin: We’re certainly aware. I think what we’ve been able to accomplish as a team, all going remote very suddenly, all at once adapting to the new virtual environments, beginning to run business processes, again, all the way from design and simulation, customer requirements, capture, development process, introduction to manufacturing, and ultimately scale-up, has been remarkable.

When we all looked around and pinched ourselves and saw that it could go on, and it could happen, and in some ways was better, we all did a little happy dance, and we’re cheering inside that we did it, and that we can add this to our toolbox and realize that we can innovate in different ways, and use these new tools for the better, and to reach different people. We’ve been able to hire people in different locations that probably we wouldn’t have considered in the past, and bring them on board, and have them contribute very quickly. It’s been a really good experience, in many ways, for our talent.

Ed: Joan, I just wanted to get back to the question you asked a few minutes ago, which it was around, has it changed forever? Is it all going to be this way? I think it is worth noting that there are a few things that we’ve lost in remote working. It’s not all positive. The reason I say that is literally two days ago, a colleague and I were wistfully thinking of the rooms in our offices that have huge whiteboards on them, where we could spend a few hours drawing all over the walls. It’s absolutely the case that remote working was coming anyway, it probably would have taken a decade. We did it in two weeks. We’re now one year on from that, and I think that is a huge gain and a huge positive influence, but there are a few little things that it would be really nice to get back in the office and spend some time with people.

Elizabeth: Ed, I agree 100%. I think, as Erin said, some of the remote collaboration is a tool in the toolbox but nothing beats just being hands-on, being at the whiteboard, brainstorming sessions where there’s a lot of opportunity for interaction and breakouts, and then going back and quietly thinking and tinkering is certainly a part of innovation as well. I do think having this hybrid model when we’re in the office half the time, or together with our teams in collaborating, but then taking advantage of some of these new tools to really reach more people and to be able to enhance the inclusion, I think both are really important.

Catherine: At Immersion, we’re a very small company, so diversity of thought has always been part of our culture. We’ve had small but diverse teams, but in my view, the freedom to innovate has become different. As others have said, “When you’re at the office, it’s easy to interact and bounce ideas off of each other.” We had a situation where one of our engineers in Montreal created a lab at home because he had the space and ability to do that, but some of his colleagues had a very limited space at their home to work.

That opened up a different way to innovate how they would interact with him. Montreal had a very strict lockdown, they still have a curfew, so there are challenges there. At the same time, because we are a small company to begin with because we had a good working relationship, collaboration is important, because we do have various roles, or we’re exposed to the various roles within the company. I think that made the challenges easier.

Joan: Thanks for that, Catherine. Really interesting hearing all of your input on that. Now, something I want to come back to Ed, something that you said earlier about this year’s Top 100 Global Innovators report, measuring the economic impact of innovation culture. Can you tell us a bit more about that?

Ed: Yes, this was super interesting. I guess we all hope or assume that being innovative adds value and brings growth, but the burning question is how much? Can we show that? Can we actually prove that? For the 10th edition of Top 100, we set out to answer that question. What we did is we looked at the companies that have featured in our list every single year, for example, TE. There was 29 companies, and we looked at their market capitalization as a whole over a long period of time, over a six-year period.

What we found is that this group of companies recorded greater growth in market cap compared to the Dow Jones Industrial Average or S&P 500 benchmarks over that six-year period. In fact, returned almost two and a half times value growth. What was really remarkable is we compared that same group of companies to companies that left the Top 100 list early on in 2013 or 2014, the first two years of the program. By October last year, the 10-time top 100 companies like TE had opened up a valuation gap of $57 billion per company compared to those that exited early.

Now, of course, there are lots of other factors that contribute to a company’s individual success, but through this specific analysis, through the report this year, we were able to, really from Clarivate’s perspective, for the first time to connect the dots and show that consistent innovation culture, solving not just one problem, but thousands and thousands of problems is a very powerful indicator of a company’s long-term success and value.

Joan: Thanks, Ed. Now, Erin, Elizabeth, and Catherine, what do you make of this connection between being innovative and long-term success? Let’s start with you, please, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth: Sure. I’m not surprised by those statistics at all, Ed. Innovation is really the lifeblood for any growth company. At BD, it also drives the impact that we have on our patients, long-term. Certainly, the strength of our pipeline drives our long-term sustainable growth and our company valuation. I’d say, more importantly, it’s about the patient impact and the cumulative innovation, in medical devices, that’s really transformed care to be less invasive, more reliable, improve both clinical and economic outcomes for patients. To me, that’s our professional legacy, and that impact is lasting. I’m really proud to be a part of the MedTech innovation community and leading BD’s next wave of innovation and impact.

Joan: Thank you. Erin?

Erin: Yes, innovation goes well beyond product design. At TE, we have a continuous improvement mentality that couples with our innovation culture. It’s a never-give-up mentality. It’s a mindset that we use to solve whatever challenge we come our way. I think solving those problems, as Ed said, over and over, thousands of problems every day just cumulatively add up to value creation that is sustainable. I think that’s how we at TE look at it. We call it, “Every connection counts,” and we mean it. The innovation culture underpins all of that.

Joan: So every connection counts. Catherine, finally, to you.

Catherine: I see this as the reason to continue to innovate, stay curious and you’re building value for the company. The business people want to know why they’re spending the money, and as the patent attorney, I have to interact between research, engineering, and the business people. They’re innovators, they have to understand how they have to communicate the value to the business side, and then the business side sees that value. I think it’s core, and it’s just a sense of pride at the end of the day, contentment, and a job well done.

Joan: A job well done. Thanks, Catherine, and a great point at which to draw our chat to an end. I’d like to thank you all for joining me today. Catherine Maresh.

Catherine: Thank you, Joan.

Joan: Elizabeth McCombs.

Elizabeth: Thank you. I’ve enjoyed the conversation.

Joan: Erin Byrne.

Erin: Great to be here today. Thank you very much.

Joan: And Ed White.

Ed: Thanks very much, Joan.

Joan: It’s been a fascinating insight into the Top 100 Global Innovators. What it takes to create a culture of innovation and how human ingenuity continues to overcome what may seem to be insurmountable challenges. Please follow and listen to Ideas to Innovation for engaging, informative, and inspirational content with insights you can use. Available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and other podcast directories. Share, like, review, or join the conversation with your comments on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook by clicking on the share link. Thank you for joining us. Until next time, I’m Joan Walker. Goodbye.

Announcer: The Ideas to Innovation podcast from Clarivate.

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