Spencer de Groot, Manager, Reed Elsevier Innovation Support Office
Spencer de Groot is unashamedly proud of the part he played in developing Scopus, the world's largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature.
“Scopus has been getting tremendous praise for ease of use, so I feel proud of having designed the foundation of its user interface,” he says. “The quality of the design however, is not a result of a sudden bright spark, but rather of years of hard work in gaining user insights and experimenting with numerous designs.”
Reed Elsevier’s focus on innovation has been crucial in recent years, not least with the move away from print to online publishing and digital solutions. Spencer says big companies can be as highly innovative as small entrepreneurial firms. But it takes vision and constant effort to create an environment where new ideas can flourish.
He points to ScienceDirect, the world’s largest online library of peer-reviewed full text research papers, which is now ten years old. “Ten years is a long time ago. At the time, to many it wasn’t at all clear that this, or even the internet itself, would become a success. But the vision proved correct.”
The Innovation Support Office helps people throughout the organisation to bring new ideas to life, providing tools, methods and processes to put innovations to work. Reporting to the Innovation Advisory Council, it lays on workshops, events, an intranet and monthly newsletter.
But innovation is not limited to new products. “There is an explicit focus on innovation in operations, which in turn can be a tremendous enabler for product innovation. Other areas of innovation are, for instance, in product development processes, new markets and new business models.”
New ideas are taken “very seriously”, he says, but the biggest challenge is to choose the right ones and execute them well.
So how is innovation rewarded? “Innovators are best rewarded when they are given the opportunity, support, freedom and trust to experiment and develop their ideas into successful applications. That is what we are aiming to do.”