Skills transfer key to innovation

While financial constraints can place considerable pressure on the ability of small companies to develop innovative technologies and products - few companies can afford the risk of innovation failure - an even greater constraint is the general lack of high-level technical skills.

But JSE-listed Prism Holdings - the trusted transactions company that allocated 12% (R31 million) of its turnover to R&D during its 2004 financial year and generated 82% of its revenues through the sale of technologies, solutions and services incorporating its own IP in the same period - has developed an unusual solution to the skills issue.

According to Prism CTO Graham McKay, innovation at Prism is usually stimulated by customers or management asking for "the impossible", for old things to be done in new ways or new things to be done using old technology or infrastructure.

"Prism has cultivated a mindset that accepts these challenges as positive opportunities rather than negative problems. But we recognise that our ability to exploit these opportunities depends on our ability to fully utilise and grow the skills within our organisation," he explains.

In order to achieve this, Prism runs an ongoing training and mentoring programme that is focused on widening the knowledge base of each staff member. It is company policy to ensure that skills from experienced staff members are constantly transferred to other staff members - including those with limited skills in technology fields. The skills transfer also takes place across different technology disciplines.

For example, structured mentorship programmes are used to transfer a new technological approach successfully implemented in one technology group - for example, cryptography - to another group, such as application development.

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"Prism also uses team-based cross-functional projects to transfer skills. When a project gets under way within one technology group, an individual who has the basic knowledge to understand a new discipline is directly exposed to it by being included in and working with an experienced team. He or she then acquires the new knowledge in the course of the execution of the project.

"This team member will then normally return to his/her team and have this new experience available as a general knowledge. He or she will also then be a resource that can be called on at short notice to assist when there is a manpower shortage on the discipline learned earlier," McKay explains.

"Prism achieves a two-fold objective with this approach to training: not only do we have staff with the ability to slot in where required on different projects, we have found that giving highly intelligent individuals an opportunity to grow their knowledge base and skills set via this type of development programme motivates them. They see the challenges that are offered to them as a means of advancing their careers. The more exposure they have and the broader their knowledge base, the more likely they are to progress in their desired career direction."

At Prism, technical careers can either advance down a purely technical route towards becoming a technical specialist, or they can lead towards more general management orientated positions such as a team leader.

"In essence, assignment variety coupled with extensive training and cross-skilling of people`s knowledge extract maximum value of employees and offers the workforce distinctive career possibilities. At the same time, our focus on continuous learning has played a major role in enabling Prism to develop the type of innovative solutions that can compete in the global arena," McKay concludes.