Thought Leaders in Corporate Innovation: Paolo Juvara, Group Vice President, Oracle Applications Lab (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: One point we should probably highlight is the intellectual property issue. When you are going through the One Million by One Million program on your own, you own the intellectual property.

Of course, this is an Oracle program. It’s a very reasonable conclusion that the intellectual property belongs to Oracle. For everyone who’s learning the One Million by One Million methodology and coming up with an idea through this process, the intellectual property belongs to Oracle.

Paolo Juvara: Absolutely. It’s an Oracle-sponsored program. Having said that, people also learn skills. There’s also an employee retention value in this program, but should people decide to move on, they have learned skills that they can apply to their next venture.

Sramana Mitra: The other point is, people are required to do the program outside of their day job as an extracurricular. The way to think about this is, a lot of people do executive MBAs and do all kinds of trainings on their own time to advance their careers. It’s not like you can do it in lieu of a day job. You have to do your day job and this is happening on the side and you’re going to have to make time to develop your skills and studying.

There’s one point we should probably discuss before concluding. When we started working together on this experiment, the only other really well-known corporate innovation experiment was Google’s flexible time thing, which was a total failure. Why do you think it failed? What have we done that has been successful?

Paolo Juvara: I’m not in a position to say whether it failed or why it failed, but I can say why it won’t be applicable for us. The primary goal here is to allow people to develop skills that they will not normally gain as part of their job. That doesn’t quite work because if I give people free time to do whatever they want to do, what they end up doing is what they’re already able to do. They are engineers and they say, “I have an idea. Let me start coding.” That is not what we want them to learn.

What we want them to learn are skills that they would not already have and not gain as part of their daily work. For that, we need to give them a bit of guidance or structure. The One Million by One Million program was perfect in that regard. It gives structure. It gives people the hands-on experience of having an idea and developing based on what they learn. That worked very well for us because of that element. Just giving people free time to do whatever they want doesn’t necessarily allow them to learn new things.

Sramana Mitra: The other decision we made along the way is to constrain what we encourage them to work on, which I think was also an important decision. When we were asking for ideas early on, we would see a lot of B2C ideas. We categorically said that we were not going to let them work on B2C ideas. You can work on B2C ideas on your own time. If you want to be part of the Oracle One Million by One Million program, you have to work on a B2B company. Oracle is not in B2C.

Paolo Juvara: Correct. We want ideas that eventually could be applicable to Oracle and therefore B2B is a requirement. Having said that, we also saw some ideas that started as a B2C idea but morphed into B2B.

Sramana Mitra: We’ve done a lot of experimentations and continue to do a lot of experimentations. That has been the most fulfilling part of this collaboration. We have been very creative and collaborative. The spirit of the program has been absolutely fantastic. From the One Million by One Million team, I want to thank Paolo, Susan, and everybody else who participated in judging. It’s been a superb collaboration. Thank you for giving us that opportunity.

Paolo Juvara: The program has been very successful and has delivered tremendous value. Thank you.

Sramana Mitra: Great. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Corporate Innovation: Paolo Juvara, Group Vice President, Oracle Applications Lab
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