The Importance of Innovation and Technology

The Importance of Innovation and Technology

Currently I am a Sr. Financial Analyst at Thomson Reuters (TR); the world's leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals. The financial services industry is an environment of constant change; therefore to remain competitive Thomson Reuters has placed great emphasis on innovation. The company has even hired Amanda West, as Chief Innovation Officer, to work along with a team to boost innovation within the organization. Thomson Reuters's innovative strengths lie within the fact that they steer a common innovation and then creates the basic environment and infrastructure to enable this process. There is a consistent definition of what innovation means among all employees. All senior leaders participate in innovation efforts; they are provided with the tools and training to facilitate innovation. Managers are educated on the benefits of innovation, and then they are mandated to drive this message within their groups. Thomson Reuters interprets innovation as being smart about how they can maximize their growth, by having deep fact-based customer insight and a level of understanding that helps them to anticipate their customer needs. Thomson Reuters encourages the collaboration of employees from different units within their organization to work with each other to establish solutions on how each department could be improved. Cross-unit collaboration combining insights and knowledge from different parts of the same company in order to develop new products and businesses is not easily achieved (Hansen & Birkinshaw, 2007).

Although Thomson Reuters has a great innovative strategy, they could use improvement in certain areas. One of their weaknesses is the lack of communication with employees on the front lines; information obtained is often from the perception of leadership. The single most important improvement mechanism is the ability to listen to and act on the ideas of front-line employees (Getz & Robinson, 2007). Innovation is not solely about pure invention; TR in their innovation process tends to launch too many new products in too little time; this can be catastrophic. To compete with Bloomberg, they have recently launched Eikon which is a great financial tool; however it is not as successful on the market as projected because it still requires massive cleanup and testing. In the video segment "Don't Let Success Stifle Fresh Thinking" Robert Herbold, states that a company's success can be a barrier in their continuous improvement. I do agree with this notation; however I believe that the case for Thomson Reuters is the opposite. Due to their success they are constantly innovating. Employees are constantly experiencing change, whether it is products, policies, management or ideas. Within the past two years innovation has been the constant drive. As a result of this innovation