Translator: Claire Ghyselen Reviewer: Ellen Maloney
So, good evening.
Today, I want to share some of my views about successful innovation.
Lots of people are talking about innovation
and especially when you come to the digital space
and the world of start-ups.
Our start-ups need to innovate, we need to innovate,
to create a new world and hopefully of course, for a better tomorrow.
But, a great idea is not enough.
What we really need to create, is a successful innovation
and today, I would like to express my view
about how to transform a great idea into successful innovation.
This view is based on my own experience with I.R.I.S.,
a company that I have founded more than 30 years ago.
I.R.I.S. was a university spin-off
which transformed into a successful company with over 600 employees,
and which is also a leader in intelligent document recognition.
So, everything started at the university.
And as you may know, at the university, we like to analyze things
and we like to build models to capture and manage the complexity.
For instance, with a 4P model,
we will explain that it's not enough to have a product
but that you need to have taken into account the price, the promotion
and the place.
And then if you add the people in there, you get to the 5P model.
If you add the process and the physical condition, you get to the 7P model.
And then, one day, you are in the field
and you may become slightly less analytical.
Even,
you could rely on some very simple American wisdom such as:
"I was at the right place, at the right time with the right product,"
or: "It is better to be lucky than to be smart."
Simple as you see, all that we need is to have a little bit of luck.
But being at the right place, at the right time with the right product,
is it only sheer luck or can it be prepared?
And this is the question I would like to address today.
Let me share with you my model for successful innovation.
It's actually very simple.
successful innovation, in the middle, is equal to:
select, to plan and to commit.
One, two and three.
The interesting thing about this model,
is that it is not trying to focus on establishing links
between many different kind of elements.
Instead, it is trying to focus on what you have to do
to define the key action to design your successful innovation.
Let's start with "select."
At I.R.I.S.,
one of the key factor of success was to be able to constantly innovate
and also to commercialize our inventions successfully.
And when running [this] kind of company,
what is one of the big problems when you are running this kind of company?
The big problem,
is that you often have too many ideas and too few people.
And this leads you into a very big frustration.
Sometimes, I wanted to scream,
"Give me 100 more engineers and I will put them [to] work."
But in the real world,
you have actually to select the few ideas
on which you can work with your limited resources.
And this of course brings you to the next questions.
The first one: when is it a good time to start working on my great idea?
Second, what is the amount of resources that I have to put on this project?
This of course means you get to the question of how to plan your project.
To explain the importance of planning I have very good example to illustrate it.
It's a breakthrough idea that we had at I.R.I.S.
that became a viable technology and was also a commercial success.
The name of the technology that we have developed is called "iHQC"
for "intelligent high-quality compression."
To make this easy to understand,
I often describes this technology as being the MP3 of document compression.
For those in this audience, who don't know MP3,
MP3 is a compression technology for the audio signal,
it compresses the audio signal.
iHQC is exactly doing the same thing for documents.
It compresses the images of documents by an incredible factor.
And this was a complete revolution for the archiving market,
for the document archiving market.
Indeed for many years, in the archiving market,
the only practical way to archive documents was to scan them
and to process them in black and white.
Even, if scanning in black and white, due to the Frankenstein effect,
you lose a lot of information.
Especially in picture, we had to use black and white,
because the color file were way too big, more than 10 times bigger.
And also in the text zones, the JPEG was giving some legibility issue
with the JPEG artifact.
How did we solve that?
We invented a new technology
based on the concept of intelligent compression.
This technology is taking the input document
and transform it into a three-plane representation which is extremely compact.
Of course, now we come to the interesting part of this story.
Was I.R.I.S. the first company to develop such kind of technology?
Actually, not at all.
Many companies including, HP, Canon, Xerox and many smaller companies,
did actually investigate that technology
years before we actually started this development.
This is simply because we didn't have either the money nor the resource
to research in that field.
But at the end, I.R.I.S. won that battle.
And we even managed to licence our technology
to companies like HP and Canon that were the real pioneers in the field.
So, the question is of course: why?
The answer is, this is because we have planned our efforts much better
than any other company active in that field.
This is the story.
The early developers of the multi-plane compression technology
were confronted with a specific problem, a significant problem:
there was no standard on how to store multi-plane images.
So everybody was proposing his own format for the file, for the image file,
and you needed to use a specific viewer to display the documents.
This of course was preventing the usage of this kind of technology
on very broad range.
Then, in 2005, the CCITT came into the game.
What is the CCITT?
This is an international body
which is specializing in standard for the IT industry.
And the CCITT came in, and it issued a recommendation.
This is our proposal for the standard multi-plane images.
Then shortly after,
Adobe, with the PDF format and Microsoft with the XPS format,
they decided to enhance their file format to support multi-plane images.
And at that time, we decided we absolutely needed to step in
and develop our own technology for multi-plane compression.
But as I already mentioned it, we were extremely late in that field.
So we had to plan our efforts very efficiently.
To be honest, it is another way to say that we had to rush like crazy,
if we wanted to have a small chance.
What we did was very simple.
We decided to act with speed and with two ambitious goals.
The first one was to become the best in class as quickly as possible
for this type of technology.
And the second thing was to release the technology,
only when it would beat black and white compression in all aspects.
And this time, it worked well for us.
In 2007, two years after the standard,
we released our own technology, iHQC,
with smashing messages that impressed the customer very much.
The file size was smaller than the black and white file size
and the legibility what's much better.
Then we moved very quickly on the commercial side.
And I was very lucky to convince HP to license this technology,
even if they had a similar technology of their own.
And then, the only thing left for us to do was to commit,
which means, on one hand to continuously improve the technology,
and on the other hand, capture more and more customers.
So what is my take-away messages for you?
When you are establishing your field,
you will soon discover that you have too many great ideas to pursue
and you need to make the right selection.
Then, if your idea is really great one,
other very smart people will follow you,
or even sometimes, they will be well ahead of you, which is worse.
Then you will have to plan your efforts in order to be quickly on the market
with a strong product.
And then when you are in the game,
you have to commit!
And commit means improve, sell and fight.
So, as you can see in the conclusion,
an innovative idea is not something which is right or wrong in itself.
It depends a lot on elements of context.
But it also depends a lot on what you will do with it.
You have to drive your innovation.
(Applause)