Challenges and Strategies to Drive Innovation in Organizations: Insights from Global Leaders at NVIDIA GTC 2024

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The Nvidia Global Conference ( GTC2024) stage was the ideal setting for an in-depth and inspiring discussion on the challenges and strategies for fostering innovation in organizations. One of the panels brought together renowned experts who shared their insights on how to deal with legacy systems, internal resistance and technical debt, elements that are often present on the path to innovation.

Rohit Chauan, VP at Mastercard, sees that we are facing a transformation as big as the internet itself and that all leaders must frame their projects thinking about taking advantage of the main capabilities of new technologies.

In the case of the Internet, the cost of communication and connection, for example, tends to zero. At that time, all companies that were able to look at their challenges and projects through the lens of zero-cost communication came out ahead. And this created a series of opportunities in all aspects of the business, such as online stores, service applications, etc.

Today, the cost of creating forecasts and what-if scenarios is trending cameroon whatsapp number database zero. So every leader should look at their challenges through the lens of simulation and forecasting.

“What can we do differently now that we have this incredible simulation machine in our hands?” That should be the question every leader should ask themselves.

Adobe’s Cynthia Stoddard adds that a big part of a leader’s role in this context is to identify problems or opportunities, ask the right questions, encourage debate, and foster a safe environment for innovation. It’s also important to create a culture where a certain level of failure or trial and error is acceptable, and prepare corporate structures to take advantage of AI.

Cynthia says that Adobe created a unified data source to make this information available to all teams and managed to get them all to share their databases. But all of this is only possible with efficient Change Management so that people understand what they would gain from it.

Clara Shi, CEO of Salesforce AI, says the nature of innovation is changing and that in the future you may not actually need to rewrite software for innovation, but that will only happen if data is accessible and collaboration is encouraged.

According to her, companies have always lived in a world of structured data, and today we have the possibility of using unstructured data. This means that if we overcome the integration challenges, we can put around 80% more data in people's hands.

How to bring people into the innovation boat?
Alex Balazs, VP at Intuit, believes that the biggest challenge for a traditional organization is creating the trust and corporate structure needed to innovate. After all, large organizations tend not to look favorably on mistakes and usually do not have adequate incentives to stimulate innovation. Therefore, he feels that more than looking outside, it is necessary to look inside and organize a system of success metrics, incentives and leadership that stimulate innovation.

Susanna Holt, VP at Autodesk, sees that the process requires a delicate balance, where value and empathy for current solutions are exercised, but at the same time, people are engaged in building something new. Therefore, whenever possible, she tries to encourage projects between new and old teams, so that everyone is connected with the same mission.

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Cynthia adds that another important point is to educate teams, both formally (with courses and objectives) and informally, simply by opening up space for people to interact with these tools and experiment freely.

Rohit points out that a big problem is that a lot of Enterprise companies’ revenue comes from legacy technologies that still work well and are too robust to be rebuilt with new approaches. So a lot of the effort comes from integrating legacy stacks with new technologies to generate value.

Susanna adds that another challenge is human, since people working on legacy systems may feel demotivated and want to abandon core systems that are essential to the company. It is essential to create a sense of positive evolution and not something that discards or simply replaces the good work that is being done. In this sense, it is essential to have good communication, where the purpose of the change, the path, the advantages and the importance of this team in the context are clear.

Alex adds the human aspect in the sense of taking advantage of the talents that work on legacy systems, training them and motivating them so that they — who know them like no one else — can be qualified to evolve or revolutionize these systems.