How does Axis foster a culture of innovation?

The mission to innovate for a smarter, safer world has always been engrained into the DNA of Axis. But how do we create and maintain a culture of innovation? To learn more about this, we spoke with Thomas Ekdahl, Manager of the Products, Concepts, and new ideas (PCNI) team: a team at Axis who work full time on innovation and new ideas.

What do you do in your team, and how do you encourage an innovative mindset?

In our team, we don’t create products. Instead, we write the story about something new that could be beneficial for Axis in three to five years’ time. You could say that we are the greenhouse within Axis. We’re protecting new ideas, building them strong and making them concrete and tangible. Going from a sketch on a napkin to something that will start discussions.

It’s very important to encourage the curiosity that is within us as people and engineers. Curiosity is crucial in terms of what is happening within technology, about how our business works, and about the issues that need to be resolved. Both currently and in the future.

We have a lot of relaxed and informal discussions with our partners and end customers, for example. They provide a lot of valuable insights that we can feed with other insights from our wider internal network. Of course, we can do some elaboration and assumptions ourselves, but it is important that we understand the needs of our stakeholders. We try to get as much stimuli as possible into the group.

“It’s about looking to decode what lies further down the road, beyond the issue the customer is expressing in the present”

Thomas Ekdahl

How do you come up with new ideas?

We always have open channels of dialogue with our partners, integrators, end customers and colleagues. This helps us to better understand the issues that need to be resolved, and to drive us to come up with new ideas. We also have a three-to-five-year, long-term view on what could occur. We conduct a trend study once a year within technology trends specifically. We look at what’s going on, how it could affect Axis, and if we see any potential threats that need to be addressed or opportunities we can develop. It’s like the quote from Henry Ford “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”. It’s about looking to decode what lies further down the road, beyond the issue the customer is expressing in the present.

Why is fostering an innovation culture so important to Axis?

When it comes to innovation, we are in a very fast moving and competitive business. We are market leaders, and that makes us a target for competition. We need to be the front runners; we have no choice in that really. This is one of the biggest reasons why innovation is so important to us.

Luckily, we have an organizational culture that promotes open-mindedness and quick communication. This helps to drive new initiatives from different departments within Axis, all in the name of innovation. In this way Axis is more of a community than a company because we have a bottom-up approach. We continuously go back, re-evaluate, and think about how we can continue to be innovative. We are a growing company and it’s not as easy to navigate as it was ten years ago, but by understanding and acknowledging that, we can find better ways to address it in a good way.

“Luckily, we have an organizational mindset that promotes open-mindedness and quick communication. This helps to drive new initiatives from different departments within Axis, all in the name of innovation”

Thomas Ekdahl

How do you sustain that culture?

We try to ensure everyone feels recognized for what they are doing. Ultimately, it’s a matter of maintaining the passion and motivation among our employees. It’s something that we continuously have to practice.

For example, how you approach someone who has come up with an idea. Should I ditch it outright or take the time to ask how we can help them develop it? Ideas are something that continuously undergo change, and it is rare that an idea will be presented in its final form, so we must be respectful in how we approach a person with a new idea. We are more of a collective genius, rather than a lone genius with a brilliant idea.

Another way is to lower the threshold for innovation. To some people innovation may seem scary, but for me it’s about constantly asking yourself ‘how can I make the things I’m doing today, better for tomorrow?’.

It is not that complicated. People tend to think of innovation as being the next big disruptive phenomenon, something that will change the way the world views and uses technology. That doesn’t happen very often. We launched our disruptive technology with the network camera. It wasn’t supposed to be that way, but we reached a point where it began outperforming existing technology. It’s important then to have patience, to look ahead but to keep the conversations going regarding new things. That is the key to innovation. We try not to allow anyone to get too downhearted at the first sign of push back.

We have a saying that we will not put new ideas in the bin, instead we will put them on the shelf. Maybe we need to wait for the right time, the right business conditions perhaps, then we can come back and revisit it. Take it down from the shelf and re-evaluate it.

It’s about conveying the right mindset. Everyone is entitled to innovate at Axis, expected even. Innovation is encouraged and we have to respond when innovation is happening in respectful ways. By doing that we will create and maintain a space of psychological safety, which is something that needs to be in place for innovation to happen and thrive.

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