Driving Innovation in an Increasingly Remote Workforce

Max Havey: Hello, and welcome to another edition of Security Visionaries, a podcast all about the world of cyber, data, and tech infrastructure, bringing together experts from around the world and across domains. I'm your host, Max Havey, Senior Content Specialist here at Netskope, and today we're talking about the world of remote work and innovation with our guest, Rebecca Hinds, the Head of the Work Innovation Lab at Asana. Rebecca, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us today.

Rebecca Hinds: Thanks so much, Max. I'm really looking forward to the conversation, and it's great to be here.

Max Havey: Absolutely. And joining us as well, a friend of the show, we have Yihua Liao, the head of Netskope AI Labs. Yihua, thank you for joining us today.

Yihua Liao: Thank you, Max. I'm glad to be back on this show again.

Max Havey: Absolutely. We're glad to have you back. So let's jump right in here. In the world of remote work and innovation, there's a lot floating around. You know, Rebecca, to start things off here, what are some key tactics to consider to make innovation a part of everyday work? What are some tactics that you would offer to folks out there in the ether?

Rebecca Hinds: It's a great question and a difficult one, especially in our day of age right now when there's so much overload associated with work. We're trying to do more with less and innovation is so difficult, primarily because it's hard to create intentional space for it. And so I think that's the most important aspect of driving innovation is being intentional about how do you create that space for innovation. Innovation requires creativity, it requires blue sky thinking, and it requires the mental capacity for those aspects as well. As an example, right now on my team, we're currently doing a two week, what we call Winnovation Week, that's intentionally devoted to fostering innovation, canceling as many meetings as possible, taking as much off of our plate so that we can focus on that creativity that we know is a core driver of innovation. So I think that's step one. Step two is we know from the research, there's a lot of evidence to support the fact that innovation requires embracing failure and having the psychological safety to be creative, make mistakes. And I think that type of culture where you're de-stigmatizing failure. We know that your most creative idea is actually most likely to come after your 20th idea or 25th idea.

Rebecca Hinds: And often we, again, don't create the space for it. And we don't create the culture where it's okay to fail 20 times before you come up with the best creative idea that's going to fuel innovation. So I think creating a culture where you're celebrating well intentional, thoughtful failure is key. And then I think third is I see the most innovative teams today wearing multiple hats. And I think the more that business leaders can start to hire generalists in their organization, especially when we think about AI, the importance of having subject matter expertise. On my team, we've been really intentional about hiring world-class researchers, but also hiring people who can communicate the research, who can design, who can code, and having full stack people in your organization fosters innovation because it encourages connecting dots across disciplines. It also enables you to be a little bit more independent in terms of less reliance on other groups, other departments, resourcing, and be able to innovate in a space that's a little bit siloed, which we also know that silos are a key part of driving innovation. Cross-functionality is important and having that collaboration across your organization is essential, but you also need some level of independence to be able to execute in that safe, enclosed space.

Max Havey: Definitely. The idea of having those dedicated spaces and being very intentional, as you said at the beginning of your answer there, having all of that around helps better drive and better encourage that culture of innovation there.

Rebecca Hinds: Absolutely.

Max Havey: Totally. And Yihua, I know Rebecca covered a lot in her answer. Anything else from your perspective, any other tactics that you would offer for making innovation a part of everyday work?

Yihua Liao: Yeah, Rebecca definitely had a lot of great points. Just to add some of the tactics that we have used at Netskope AI Labs. So we are a team of AI researchers as well, focusing on trying to use some of the latest AI machine learning technology to make our security platform better. Innovation is really important for our team. Some of the things that we tried include just to foster this open communication and collaboration culture. So within our team, we have weekly team meetings and also monthly deep dive meetings where people can really share what's on their mind and what they have learned from their projects.

Yihua Liao: And also what are some of the latest trends that we see? In the industry. And that has been one of the platforms people feel like they're really encouraged to share their own ideas and try to learn from each other. And then another thing that has worked really well for us is that we try to bring in folks from other teams as well, people with this cross-functional collaboration. We think it's also very important because most of the folks on my team, they have very deep AI expertise. But then when we solve security problems, we also need domain knowledge. We need the domain experts. So we try to have very close collaboration with folks who know, for example, malware very, very well and know phishing really, really well. We try to collaborate with them and pick their brain and then see how we can use machine learning to solve those problems. So those are just some of the things that we try to do on a regular basis in order to foster this innovative culture within my team.

Max Havey: Definitely. It's the same sort of cross-functional thinking and working cross-functionally while also working independently and finding a way to bring those things together so that you can do this in the best possible way and get the best possible outcome.

Rebecca Hinds: We've done some research on the nature of those cross-functional interactions. And what we see is that the most important cross-functional relationship for innovation is the relationship between engineering and marketing. And I think that's something that's a little bit counterintuitive. It makes sense because you need great development. You need to have a great team that's going to bring it to market effectively. But often it's not in the mindset of leaders to, if they're an engineering team, to bring in marketers earlier on or vice versa. And I think that's something that is is absolutely critical as we think about being intentional about innovation, intentionally bringing together those groups that maybe don't sit next to each other, maybe don't talk to each other that often, creating that space for it.

Max Havey: Absolutely. And thinking about innovation broadly here, you know, how do you sort of measure innovation within your team? I know it's kind of an abstract concept to try and measure, but like, is there a specific metric that you're looking for? I know you are managing a team of AI researchers, like how do you specifically measure innovation within your team?

Yihua Liao: So for us, it's relatively easy, I would say. We typically look at how many machine learning models or AI models that we deploy into production, because ultimately we want to create the real impact of making our products better by leveraging some of the latest AI machine learning technology. So that's one. Second metric we typically use is how many patents we have applied or have been granted. And so far, for the past few years, four or five years, we've had almost 30 AI ML-related patents here at Netskope. So we're very, very proud of our progress. Each year we're trying to do more. So those are the successes, right? But we all know, as Rebecca mentioned, we want to embrace failure. We want to learn from failure. So evidently, some of our projects may not get good results may not get deployed into production and we may not get a patent granted as well. So we also track how many times have we tried, how many new projects we've explored. And I think that's also a very important metric as well. We do want to encourage our team members to explore, to experiment.

Max Havey: Definitely. That sort of iteration is what kind of begets some of these greater successes. You don't follow down some of those roads if you aren't kind of failing first and realizing what stuff doesn't work there. I think that's just as important as seeing what sort of like, you know, what paths have gone through, which have been successful. And that's kind of an interesting measure to think about is not only the successes, but those failures. And Rebecca, from your view, what are some of those sort of key metrics or key ways to measure innovation that you're using over on your team?

Rebecca Hinds: And we've thought a lot about this, and we've actually done extensive research to look at the drivers of innovation. Often innovation is a little bit of a lagging indicator. And so we've tried to distill what differentiates the most innovative companies from less innovative companies, looking across thousands of different companies. And what we found is consistently there are four drivers of innovation. So the first is cohesion. So we've talked about this a little bit, how well employees are working together, how cohesively they're working together. We know that innovation is a team sport and that's important. The second is velocity. So we know that a big part of innovation is speed of execution. So velocity is about how quickly do ideas and work and decisions flow through your organization. The third is what we call resilience. So this is how stable or how robust is your org