Katherine Manuel & Gautam Jain, innovation leaders at Thomson Reuters

Katherine: One of my first jobs was working for a strategy and technology firm for a few years, before I got my MBA degree. Thomson Reuters have a great management associates programme where they rotate MBAs throughout the organisation. I moved around as part of the programme then began to work in the strategy side of the business. I ended up running the technology strategy area. After a few years I wanted to try something different so I started working more on the strategy communications side of things. When Jim Smith became CEO I came back to work in the office of the CEO as a Vice President of Strategy. After some time here working on the transformation programme I was asked to head up innovation.

Gautam: I grew up in a small town near Mumbai, India. I studied computer technology, then joined the country’s largest IT consulting firm. I then pursued my MBA in Finance from Mumbai University, and like Katherine, joined the Business Graduate Programme at Thomson Reuters. I spent the initial six months on the customer helpdesk which was an excellent place to learn about our products and customers.

Katherine: Innovation definitely needed to come from the top, from our CEO. At the end of 2013 there were some big announcements in terms of transformation, and one of the key messages was that we are changing and we are not going back. So this is not a phase, it is reality. We had previously grown through acquisition. Through transformation we had to rationalise and make sense of our acquisitions, but then drive and grow, fundamentally through innovation.

The MENA Innovation Lab was inaugurated in July 2015 by HH Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai. The purpose of the lab is to foster a culture of innovation in MENA by providing opportunities to staff, clients and third parties to gather, discuss and try innovative ideas. This enabled entrepreneurs and start-ups to establish smart applications, transform data into knowledge, and ultimately give them a leg-up in terms of innovating.

Katherine: Identify innovation change agents — people who can stimulate and highlight opportunities. We provide the opportunity for our staff members who have good ideas to take them forward, and get some time in front of our senior management team to pitch and work out their ideas. As long as the person has some level of sponsorship, then you can take forward that idea and discuss it with people in the organisation that could make it a reality.

Gautam: My honest opinion is that it’s a lot easier to innovate and pivot in a smaller company, exactly because of its size and because often there are fewer corporate barriers. Most of the truly great ideas often originated when organisations were really small anyway. It’s about having an open culture, being willing to fail, and having leaders or founders who can get the best ideas out of people, opening the conduit of communication, and valuing everyone’s opinion.

Katherine: I will say that, from a work perspective, the Second Machine Age was phenomenal. The other one I have been reading on a personal front is Authentic Happiness by Martin Seligman, who works out of the University of Pennsylvania. It looks at how you take someone who is very happy, and how you can make them even happier.

Gautam: One of the movies I really like which links to innovation is Her, which is about a man who falls in love with his virtual assistant on his mobile device. One of the scary things about this film is that I don’t think we are really that far away from this. I am in the middle of the book Getting Things Done, by David Allen, which has lots of tips that can help in terms of productivity and managing time.