Elma Kapa is a Senior Program Manager, Xylem Innovation Labs at Xylem Inc. in Switzerland. She has a background in Indirect Procurement, having spent over ten years at Electrolux Professional.

As a senior manager within the Innovation team, you work with lots of new ideas. How do you balance risks and opportunity?

The true innovators need to take calculated risks, and they need to expand thinking beyond organizational walls.

What we do is to form partnerships in the key areas that represent the biggest pain points - and opportunities - for our customers. Every year, we evaluate - both technically and commercially - over 200 technologies.

We work with early-stage companies, to develop their technologies, geared towards commercial readiness. But we also work with later stage companies and start-ups that are looking to commercialize their technologically-ready product or services.

So, collaboration with external companies allows both parties to have lower structural costs, shared in-demand resources, and faster speed to market. This de-risks development, while accelerating the technology advancement and commercial scale-up.

I would say, alone, it would be extremely difficult to scale up and reach a global customer base, but together - in partnership - I think there's a huge opportunity for all of us.

Of course, we accept that some projects will fail; not all of them will fit our business needs, not all of them solve the problems our customers are trying to solve – and that’s okay. I think the failures are opportunities for us to grow.

So, the calculated risk is something that the Innovation teams need to take if they really want to advance breakthrough technologies on the market.

What’s the most exciting thing you've worked on recently or what is the most exciting part of your role?

When we think of innovation, we tend to link this to the cutting-edge products that enter a market and disrupts an industry sector completely.

Even if we think about the internet itself - that is part of our life almost in any aspect - it has taken over the world, forcing some industries to meet its standards. It has disrupted many of them: music, books, retail stores...

What I'm saying is: what would happen if we’re not able to deploy and test these technologies? This is a particularly relevant challenge in the industry I work for - the water industry - trying to serve the utility sector.

So, I would say that the most exciting part of the Innovation team I work with, in my role, is really to explore these new ways to join the dots between stakeholders and end users, trying to forge the creative alliances across the sector.

We must often come up with new business models. Developing these new models, trying to implement them in our organizational set-up, is one of the most exciting parts of my role.

To make a real change, to advance global industry, all players need to connect, need to play in partnerships. By this, I mean non-profit organizations, governments, consultants, distributors, everyone… Even collaborating with our industry peers is probably the way that we can change the perception and the approaches to new technology adoption.

I think it is very exciting when you expand your thinking beyond your organization and along with others in the network you collaborate to find a better way to serve your customers and solve their challenging problems.

What would you say is the most rewarding part of your role?

The most rewarding part is when we get the parties working together, aligning all goals and promoting, supporting and pushing, internally and externally, the new technology, that alone would not be able to be deployed or tested.

In the future, what do you see as the biggest challenges for the business and also the businesses that you partner with?

One of the biggest levers a company has to drive growth is to bring new, breakthrough technologies to the market.

Large corporations struggle to keep up with the pace of technological advancement. Most corporations tend to create Corporate Innovation teams, as a proxy for or to supplement the traditional Research & Development efforts. The challenges we face with these Corporate Innovation teams is probably the challenge everyone generally faces when trying really to implement innovation, which is an unclear mandate and a lack of organizational alignment.

So, the primary way to support and engage in a third-party innovation is to reimagine the existing corporate innovation program.

Innovations requires long-term investments, and these require patience and incubation. These challenges are something that Innovation teams face every day, and the businesses we work with are facing every day. So, we need to work together, trying to accelerate the rate with which these technologies are brought in, adopted, and accepted in the market.

Your background is within Procurement & Supply Chain. Do you feel having that background has given you any advantages in your current role?

Absolutely, I would say that was crucial in this role. Understanding the complexity and the nuances of a multi-national organization and being able to influence the team members and stakeholders and third parties involved in the negotiation process and being able to translate the corporate objectives into the functional deliverables is one of the crucial skills developed within the supply chain experience and which you learn quite well.

I would say that this is also very important in my current role as a Program Manager, because you leverage those skills trying to support team’ project executions and closing the gap between the technology expertise and the way to bring that technology on the market.

I would say that, in the Procurement experience I had - mainly in indirect materials and services - almost every negotiation is a separate project, has a different scope of work, and you need to align end users and various stakeholders, with frequently different goals and functional needs.

Therefore, negotiation and influencing skills learnt in procurement are of extreme importance to bring various involved parties together and to align their common objectives to get to the deal. I’d also say that agreeing on terms and conditions is just the start of agreement deployment which without previous alignment and partnership work would never really happen.

Finally, what’s your favourite business motto and why?

This is a very good question. I would say that probably - because of my previous experience in Procurement, but also the challenges that we face in Innovation - my business motto would be “challenges are opportunities to grow”.

I'm saying this because we face challenges every day in different aspects - completely different from project to project- and failures, as well as successes, are not destinations, but represent really the way for us to evolve.

We all face moments when we are trying to accomplish something, and it doesn't work and we tend to give up, to say, this is not possible. We stop believing it's possible.

I think those are moments where we really need to push forward. Those are moments where we need to have the courage to continue, and to find the different ways to make it work, sometimes very different than what we thought at the beginning.

This is something I tend to remind myself when I’m facing challenges in my daily work; I like the approach of not giving up, very easily, on things.

Thank you to Elma for speaking to Charlotte Cruise, Senior Consultant in our Procurement & Supply Chain recruitment team in Switzerland.

Views and opinions contained within our Executive Interviews are those of the interviewee and not views shared by EMEA Recruitment.