 Mr. Hagridon, we welcome you to Qatar and to ICQATAR's Connective Speaker Series. We're very happy to have you here. And first, we'd like to know from you, since this is the topic of your session today, how ICT can generally contribute to energy efficiency. So first off, it's great to be here. And I appreciate the welcome. ICT is actually going to play a huge role in climate change and in increased energy efficiency. I think one of the things that's most important about recognizing that is that ICT has the opportunity to make contributions across the range of energy consumption and production. Essentially, it operates by what would say making the grid smarter. But what that really means is capturing inefficiencies and by doing so, making the whole grid more efficient. So ICT is a solution that sort of applies to all of the problems we have. And in that way, I think it distinguishes itself from solar or wind or hydro in that it's not simply an energy supply solution. I'm interested to know that how cloud computing can help lessen carbon footprints. And whether you see any further technologies that could arise or could emerge that could also help in the environmental aspect. Cloud computing is going to make a huge difference. I think the ways in which it could help with carbon footprint is particularly the opportunity to get rid of our in-home computing devices, which all tend to use a fair amount of electricity, whether they're on or off. And cloud computing makes it an opportunity to reduce that energy consumption across all markets, residential and consumer business. Then now that said, cloud computing could also cause more trouble in that data centers take an enormous amount of energy to run. And while they're more efficient than all of us having the equivalent computing power at home, they provide us with much more computing power. And that means that one of the biggest growths in energy demand right now are coming from those data centers. So we have a long way to go to make those more efficient. And so cloud computing is going to really have that double-edged sword. It's going to help us make our own computing more efficient, but at the same time the more it becomes ubiquitous, the more energy it will demand. Any further innovations that you believe could also help in the environmental aspect in the future? Well, particularly around ICT, I think one of the most interesting things about that set of technologies is that you really can't predict what's going to happen with them. There's going to be a lot of innovation, but we don't really know what it is yet. So we can guess on how it will be applied now, making a smarter transmission, smarter distribution, smarter energy consumption in the home. But we can't guess at how people will come up with new solutions. And that's what makes ICT so exciting in the energy space. A big part of your writings are about ICT innovation. So first I'd like to know, how can we define innovation and how is it different from invention? Right, well, you know, the big difference around innovation is that despite what it looks like in the media, innovation tends to be new combinations of old ideas. In fact, what's really driving the impact of an innovation isn't the novelty of the idea, so much as the new business model and new partners that are brought together to make that idea successful. Invention tends to be overblown in the sense that it's focusing on an individual or a particular time at which an idea happened. And it gives everybody the idea that these inventions spring up overnight and can suddenly make change. In fact, those changes take place over decades and are often the result of hard work of new policy shifts and of business innovations rather than simply technological solutions coming up. I think particularly around energy and the environment, you know, the more we look to inventions to save the day, the more misled we can be in hoping that something will come along that takes the world by storm when, in fact, those things looking back that took the world by storm weren't inventions. There were improvements on existing ideas, often brought to new markets, but they were very clearly building on existing technologies and existing people and ideas. In some cases, a new innovative idea could be really appealing. And then on the long term, we're not sure about its viability and whether it will have risk of obsolescence. So how can we really evaluate an innovative idea and field of ICT and how can we make sure that on the long term it will be worth investment or worth considering? That's a great question. I think the best way to judge a new technology is not by what it does immediately or even by what it can do as it improves in that particular application, but rather by what it enables others to do in other applications that we haven't really guessed yet. By that I mean there are some technologies which have a single purpose, solar cells, for example, where we can guess how they'll evolve and we can make our predictions about the efficiency of solar cells over the next 20 years. But we know that essentially they're going to be producing power. What we don't know about, for example, information and communication technology is how they'll be used in the future. So if we looked to the development of the internet when it was first created in 1971, we could never have predicted the uses that it created for itself. And I think that's the important perspective. When you look at a new opportunity for innovation, it's dangerous to think that you can see it, the path it will take. In fact, the path it takes, if you can see it, is probably a problem. So really you want to look for those innovations that have the opportunity to evolve and flourish in ways you wouldn't expect. Any cases we're linking between a new ICT innovation and productivity. So do you think we should always link between or should we could use productivity as the criterion to evaluate an innovation? Or what are other criteria that could be possible? Well, productivity is a critical, obviously, critical criteria because you want to make sure that it contributes immediately. Innovations shouldn't cost anything in the long run. I mean, sorry, excuse me. Innovation shouldn't cost anything in the short run. So measuring innovation by productivity, you should always have a net positive gain. It should make you more productive. But again, what you want to be able to measure an innovation on is not simply productivity in the way it was intended to be used, but also productivity and change in the way you would do other things again that you wouldn't have expected to do. And those changes are very difficult to measure. All you can really measure is the potential for those changes. One of the writings you discussed, something called the Knowledge Brokering Cycle. And you mentioned that new ideas are built on old ideas. So can you tell us quickly the phases and how you see the cycle, how it works? Just quickly briefly. You really did your reading. I did my research. But I think Knowledge Brokering is really a recognition that because innovation is a new combination of old ideas, the people that we look to that are generally very innovative have often found themselves or put themselves in a position where they could see the ideas that are out there already. And in particular, see the ideas that are out there and markets that hadn't yet seen or used those ideas and figure out ways to bring them in. What that means is that there is sort of a four-step process that my co-author Bob Sutton and I described about Knowledge Brokering. The first being finding yourself in a position where you can span multiple worlds, where you can see how ideas in one world could be used in another and find ways to make it work. Now in an organizational setting, what often happens is they need to come back and rarely do you see those ideas right when you need them. So often you need to remember them. And how do organizations remember ideas? There are a number of different ways from good to bad about organizational memory. But you need to remember them. You need to be able to retrieve them wherever they've been remembered in the organization for the time when you need them. And then you need to be able to put them together in new combinations. So I think the big challenge for organizations is keeping that memory and then keeping access to the ideas because people come and go. And then finally being willing to experiment with new combinations of those ideas as they come up. Also you dismissed the idea that innovation comes from a single genius person who's sitting in his laboratory and locked up. And how do you view ICT innovation as a collective activity rather than just a person or an initiative led by one person, not a group? Sure, well I think ICT in particular, ICT is a particularly nice technology in the sense that engender sort of collaborative creativity. People are very easy, it's very easy for people to see how those technologies are being used and learn from that and move forward. I mean a great example of this is the worldwide web. Anybody who was developing a website or a web software could see what everybody else was doing and take the best of those ideas and put them together in a new solution themselves. So rather than a closed system of innovation where one company was off doing one technology and another was off doing another and they couldn't or wouldn't share what they were doing or what they learned, a lot of the very fabric of ICT depends on people seeing what each other are trying to do and taking the best and moving forward. Yeah, you mentioned in one of your articles also about the idea generation techniques that could be followed in organizations. So how can an organization help its employees, motivate them, or even let them generate as much ideas that they could? Brainstorming is typically seen of as the way that organizations can generate new ideas. It's a structured activity in which teams of people get together and really set judgment aside for a while and try and come up with as many different new ideas as they can. It's often been described as a great cure for writer's block or creative blocks in organizations, but oftentimes it's also been described by researchers as unproductive because in fact individuals if they were to spend that time alone could in an aggregate come up with as many ideas. But it turns out that in organizations, brainstorming has a much broader role than simply getting people together to come up with ideas. It reinforces a culture in which people are encouraged to come up with new ideas. It increases the sharing of each other, among people in an organization about the ideas that they do know. And it brings people out of their cubicles for a moment to think about the problems that others in the organization are working on. So there's a range of ways in which brainstorming sort of in the wild, in organizations, has a lot of effects far and beyond just coming up with new ideas. Okay, my final question, my final question. You mentioned that in order for innovation to flourish, there should be some attitudinal change on the part of organizational leaders or organization thinking. So how do you think should they, what should their attitudes towards innovation be? How should they think about innovation? Well, there's a couple of things that people should do, but leaders especially, one of those things is to encourage prototyping, iteration, trying an idea out. So often leaders are in a very good position to simply say, no, we don't wanna do that. Now, sometimes that's critical. And if you look at Steve Jobs at Apple, for example, some of the best decisions he made were the ones he said no in. Not letting Apple get distracted by doing too many projects. There's just so many opportunities. But at the same time, a leader also needs to know when and how to say yes. And rather than saying yes and committing the organization to a particular path that they believe is right, oftentimes the best thing a leader can do is say yes to building prototypes or testing the assumptions that they and their organization are making. So first off, a leader needs to keep the organization focused on what they wanna do. The second thing is they need to keep them focused on action, on building prototypes, on testing their assumptions about what opportunities there are for innovation. And then lastly, execution. What a leader can really do is once the decision has been made to bring a new innovation forward, is to focus on execution and making it happen. Because oftentimes, even though somebody in the organization has championed an innovation, there are a lot of other people in the organization who lie in waiting to bring the idea back down. And so, a leader really needs to throw their weight once they've committed to throw their weight behind that innovation and make it happen. Thank you so much for this lovely insight.