3 Strategies for Rolling Out New Tech Within Your Company
It’s common knowledge that innovation is a critical component of any organization’s success. But what’s often less clear is how to translate innovative new ideas into on-the-ground implementation. In this piece, the authors share three strategies to help R&D teams ensure their new technologies are actually adopted, based on a comprehensive analysis of projects and employees at a large international oil company. First, innovation should start from the users: Rather than taking a top-down approach, R&D teams should work to understand what their end users actually need, and adapt technology offerings to fit users’ needs. Next, R&D teams should make sure to select the right early adopters to pilot new tech. And finally, teams should proactively preempt financial concerns by offering creative solutions to minimize how much money and time field units will need to spend to implement the new technology.
Large organizations have long understood the importance of innovation. But what does it take to transform an R&D project into a technology solution that teams on the ground actually adopt?
To explore this question, we analyzed several sources of data from a large, multinational oil company: We conducted a decade-long review of 7,000 drilling projects, examined career histories for over 30,000 engineers stretching back to 1979, and held a series of interviews with current engineers, managers, and executives. We found that the company had demonstrated a consistent interest in innovation, spending billions of dollars on R&D every year and generating almost 10,000 patents to date. Moreover, we found that when the company adopted advanced technologies that grew out of its R&D efforts, drilling costs fell by 15%, resulting in average savings of $90 million per year per subsidiary — and in an era of low oil prices, those savings made a big difference.
Despite this strong investment in innovation however (as well as clear indication that innovation pays off financially), we found that the company sometimes struggled to gain traction internally for new technologies developed by its central R&D teams. Our analysis identified several common hurdles, as well as three strategies that were particularly effective in encouraging adoption of new tools and systems:
All too often, large companies take a top-down approach, developing new technologies based on high-level strategic and financial considerations and then pushing those tools down to individual subsidiaries and teams. This can work — but we found that the frontline engineers tasked with implementation tended to be very reluctant to follow some distant R&D researcher’s instructions on how to do their jobs. As one senior engineer explained in an interview, “our operating arms don’t want new technology unless it’s absolutely proven beneficial.” And this attitude is understandable. These projects already suffer from plenty of uncertainty and risk, and if anything goes wrong, it can literally sink millions into the sand.
To overcome this reluctance, we found that a bottom-up approach was often much more effective. For example, another engineer we talked to described how his subsidiary’s head of technology was generally against using new technologies from headquarters, arguing that they tended to be a waste of time and money. As a result, whenever R&D pitched new technologies to the subsidiary, the ideas would be shot down before anyone on the ground could even evalutate them. But when this engineer happened to visit headquarters and had a chance to preview a new system R&D was developing to reduce water seepage into oil wells, it captured his imagination. When he got back from the trip and shared the new technology with his colleagues, they decided to simply ignore the head of technology and implement the solution. They quickly saw a dramatic reduction in water seepage, and their success even convinced the boss to get on board and approve the technology throughout the subsidiary.
