The professor of innovation

When was the first moment that you thought, ‘yeah I've got this, I’m a scientist’? 

It's a very complicated question for me since I'm not really in the natural sciences but rather the social sciences. So, yes, I do consider myself to be a social scientist. I'm quite interested in applying social science methods to understanding people and organisations, which are incredibly complex and difficult to predict. Typically, if someone asks me ‘what do you do?’ I say I'm a Professor and I teach Innovation Management. That's my one second or ten second pitch!  

Let's just say I worked for six years in industry doing computer science research, and then I was getting a Master's in technology and policy. But back then, even in 1989, very few people knew how to program, so I went into an electrical engineering lab that was studying electric motors. 

What myths are out there about being a scientist? 

I think that in general people who apply some kind of scientific method to understanding the world should qualify. It's funny because, like I said before, I never would have said I was any kind of scientist, and even now in management, we're considered to be the lowest rank of the lowest rung of the ladder probably of all sciences. But there's a wide variety of people out there all doing valid work in science.  

And by the way, Imperial is maybe the least snobbish university that I've ever been involved with, and I've been involved in lots of universities over the years. I think that's actually quite interesting and it gets to your point, which is, who is doing work using scientific methods? You have to be very open minded about these things. A lot of scientists, a lot of people working in academia, think that their own discipline is the best and the other ones are either not scientific or not ‘good science’, you know? Whereas I can say that I've been in different departments, different areas, I've tried different things, and I feel everybody's doing the best they can. We have our theories, and we develop new theories, and we test theories, and we apply rigorous methods. 

So I feel we should be a little bit more open minded about what it means to do scientific work. 

Why do you think someone should pursue studies or a career in your branch of science? 

I'm in management, and I think it's a very interesting area to study. It's partly because of its complexity—humans are extremely difficult to predict. Even one person is difficult to predict, even yourself, you may not even know what you're going to do tomorrow or how you're going to react in certain situations. But when you put people together in an organisation, it becomes even more difficult to figure out what's going to happen and what's the best strategy. So what I tell people about innovation management is that it takes a lot to run a company, to be a successful company. You need to have great marketing, product, product development, financial controls, you need to have a vision, excellent operations.  

A friend of mine once said that those things are kind of boring relative to innovation management. We're always trying to think of something that's new, but it’s not so obvious, you know? That's why I like to try and attack it from different angles.  

And now, since I’ve been in technological innovation management specifically, I feel like that's a very promising area since we're getting more and more technological progress happening, and those things can affect everything that a company does. So my pitch would be that this is a very important area, that it's a really interesting area, and that it's complex. It's worthy of a lot of further study. We need to have more people in this field studying this to try and push it forward.