What follows is an excerpt from an interview with Roman Dumiak, Executive in Residence at DePaul University’s Innovation Lab, on the Chief Architect Forum Podcast.
At DePaul, Dumiak compliments university’s mission by bringing together a community of technology executives who are passionate about bridging innovative businesses to world-class academics.
Brice Ominski, DeepDive World’s global chief technology officer, interviewed Dumiak, who worked in IT as the Chief Architect for Innovation at Allstate and most recently as Director of Technology Innovation at DePauls university. The interview can be heard here.
Question: Tell us about your work at DePaul regarding the Innovation Lab and the innovation framework that you used?
Answer: At DePaul, we talk about innovation in two ways. There’s big “I” innovation and small “i” innovation. There’s the disruptive kind of innovation that you hear from things like the innovator’s dilemma, where you’re really trying to go into a new business area. Then there’s what we call the small “i” innovation. With this one, you’re just trying to use technologies or concepts that are new and introduce them to your organization. You’re trying to incrementally improve the company.
Part of the group I work with at DePaul is also called the ID Lab, the Innovation Development Lab, and that’s where we give students at DePaul an opportunity to partner with companies that are doing either big “I” innovation, disruptive kinds of ideas, or incremental innovation ideas. And the students get to bring, oftentimes, a different perspective to those companies on how to use technologies from, for example, a consumer perspective.
Q: When you say disruptive innovation is that limited, or does it go beyond things like business model innovation?
A: To me, business model innovation is part of it. But really, it’s taking a completely different perspective, often resulting in a business model or maybe a new spinoff business that can potentially be started. It’s really things that are going to drastically change the way business is done. Now, it may not often result in a business model. It may be things like, a digital transformation. Here at DePaul, we are currently involved in a large transformation. Some of it is business oriented in terms of education and funding and philanthropy. Some of it is very technology related. It’s things like, “How do we change the way we do a content management