Innovation and creativity needs to be deeply woven into any company's culture. At Symantec, I see every day great technology and business ideas coming from across the company. We need to enable our team members with these ideas to work with our engineering centers, research labs, and global services teams to transform their innovative ideas into cutting-edge products and services.
Recently, Symantec was recognized for its innovation by several independent industry organizations.
- Thomson Reuters named Symantec a Top 100 Global Innovator for the 5th consecutive year. Symantec was also mentioned in Thomson Reuters' new list of top 25 Bay Area Innovators.
- Gartner named Symantec a Leader in three critical areas of the 2016 Gartner Magic Quadrant report: Data Loss Prevention, Managed Security Service Providers, and Endpoint Protection Platforms.
- AV-TEST.org announced that Symantec Endpoint Protection won the Best Protection 2015 award for corporate endpoint security
Principles of Innovation
What makes an organization truly innovative, and what are the elements that create a culture of innovation? In my experience, there are several principles that help position a company for successful innovation. These include:
- Strong culture of innovation - Innovation should be coming from the "bottom up" and not just "top down" and should be coming from all pockets of an organization; it's important for the management to create a thriving culture of innovation by providing the right contour and framework, right settings, and appropriate incentives vs. top down edicts.
- Solving contemporary problems - The trick with innovation is that it should not come too late, nor too early but at the right time where the innovative ideas can address contemporary problems and challenges facing the industry and society at large.
- Organic innovation vs. Inorganic innovation - Companies succeed or fail by their ability to innovate organically; inorganic innovation needs to complement organic innovation rather than being in lieu of it.
- Innovation in current products and technologies - This is just as important as developing brand new solutions
- Celebrating both successes and failures - It's critical for organizations to mark not only success but failures, too. What worked? What didn't? What are the lessons learned for future endeavors?
Innovation for Today and Tomorrow
As a global leader in cybersecurity, Symantec sees more threats and protects more customers from the next generation of attacks. Every day we strive to achieve a higher level of security for our customers, partners, and the entire industry.
There is an infinite demand for innovation in security due to the ever changing threat landscape. Today, we are on the cusp of a true post-industrial and digital revolution, with the advent of Cloud, Mobile, and Internet of Things. However, success of this post-industrial digital revolution will depend on organizations' and consumers' ability to trust these systems. The security industry needs to be on the front lines to defend this and defend what we all believe in—that is, a thriving and prosperous world for generations to come.
At Symantec, we're in the midst of the most active and organic product innovation cycles. More importantly, we're deeply committed to help make a difference towards the betterment of this world. Innovation and creativity inspires us to achieve this and help ensure prosperity today and tomorrow.