Short clip: Qualcomm's innovation factory

>> Qualcomm is a company that's very much focused on RND, on being a patent factory if you will. So how do you maintain from the IT perspective, that culture of innovation?

>> That's been a fun thing for me to work on, because it is a challenge. You want to make sure that people don't get so caught up in cost savings that they lose sight of we're trying to be creative, we need to come up with new ways to do things, because that's really what adds value to the company.

>> Because we hear about companies where 65, 80 percent is going into maintenance and operations, which doesn't leave a whole lot left over for innovation.

>> Right. Right now we just completed a measurment in our applications area, and 50 percent of what IT is spending on applications is going into innovation. That's driven by the business. If you go deeper into IT and look at the traditional networks, and servers, and the things that people tend to view more as a cost enter, what I've tried to do there is say to the team - we're going to create a fund that is towards innovation, towards trying out new things. So we set aside a portion of our budget for that. I also let the teams know that if they come up with an idea that saves money, they can utilize that savings within their department to look at new technology, to deploy that, to keep that innovation factory going within the IT department. It becomes a self funding model where the savings they achieve by putting in new ideas get rolled back into IT to fund further exercises.

>> What are some examples of where you've been able to roll back money into those organizations, and fund new innovations?

>> Virtualization started off that way. The team came to me and said hey, we'd like to try this out, we need about 250,000 dollars to try this out, this is about 3 and a half years ago. And I said alright, let's go do that. That's worth funding. And they started down that road, and then the money they were able to save by not buying servers, we took out of the server budget and funded it back into the virtualization, and then it just became a self funding project taking the savings from the hardware side and funding the project on a virtualization side. Now it became something of a savings engine for us, so we were actually able to return a large percentage of the dollars we saved back to the business as well.

==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====