Between innovative tactics and corporate business architecture, a specific matching relationship is required. Because business is inherently cyclical, the demand for innovation and resistance from inertia are intertwined for a long time, and mature enterprises manage innovation and overcome inertia.
—"Beauty" Geoffrey A. Moore
Wen | Xie Lirong
In the more than three years since Huawei was sanctioned by the US government in 2019, many Huawei executives and ordinary employees have repeatedly expressed the same statement: changes in the external environment have not changed Huawei's basic logic, but they have accelerated its pace in all aspects.
This year's signs suggest that Huawei's pace is accelerating further.
On April 26, Hu Houkun, Huawei's rotating chairman, released a signal at the annual analyst conference that Huawei should not only speed up its pace in system innovation, but also speed up its pace in "living with quality".
Innovation requires talent. Just the day before, on April 25, Huawei released a new version of the recruitment poster of "Genius Teenager" on its official website, offering a salary of more than five times the average income of the industry, hoping to recruit talents in the fields of digital, computer, physics, materials, chips, intelligent manufacturing, and chemistry on a global scale.
After the new recruitment order was issued, someone asked Hu Houkun what the last line of the recruitment order meant by "five times the salary". What is the cardinality? Hu Houkun did not reply positively, he said, this is a thing full of imagination space.
Hu Houkun said that Huawei should increase the guarantee of talents, funds and resources, optimize the innovation path, and "attract world-class talents with world-class problems", and today's investment is to make future development more qualitative.
Speeding up the pace of "living with quality" is to focus on the present. From Hu Houkun's speech, we distilled several cores:
First, increase customer satisfaction management;
Second, steady operation, abandon risky low-quality transactions, and enhance the quality of operation of all business units;
Third, provide talent, funds and resources for innovation, so that future development has quality.
All of the above measures have been an important foothold for Huawei to survive in the face of adversity in the past three years. However, many Huawei people confirmed to us that Huawei has entered a critical year of self-help and survival, and this year, these measures will be further intensified to ensure that efforts are maximized to seize growth opportunities and avoid business risks.
In addition to these measures, another important signal for Huawei to accelerate its pace this year is the large-scale operation of huawei's legion.
This was Hu Houkun's first public speech during the new round of duty. In March this year, Huawei issued an announcement on the current duty of the company's rotating chairman. According to the announcement, according to the company's rotating chairman system, From April 1 to September 30, 2022, Hu Houkun was the rotating chairman of the board. The Rotating Chairman is the supreme leader of the Company during his current duties and presides over the Board of Directors and the Standing Committee of the Board of Directors.
Huawei is going further and further down a different innovation path, and in order to ensure that it can go to the end, it needs to prove that it is an independent and sustainable successful company that can leave the previous 30 years of track, and in a less smooth environment, it will embark on a unique development path of technology companies.
The loach effect of the genius teenager
Most of the young people who enter Huawei's Talented Junior Program are leaders with unique strengths in certain fields. They entered Huawei through multiple rounds of strict assessment competitions, released the technical talents they were good at through the Huawei platform, and generated new variables.
In June 2019, Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei signed an internal document proposing for the first time a "talented teenager" recruitment plan to recruit outstanding young people from all over the world. The gifted teenager was given great hope of innovation. Ren Zhengfei said that Huawei will drag the world forward in the future and create its own standards.
Huawei does not limit candidates' academic qualifications and schools, but requires special achievements in mathematics, computers, physics, materials, chips and other related fields and aspires to become a technology leader.
Photo / Huawei's "genius teenagers" recruitment orders released by major official channels this year are positioned as young people who have the ability and willingness to challenge world-class problems
The salary of talented teenagers is divided into three grades, the highest grade is 1.82 million to 2.01 million yuan, the second gear is 1.405 million to 1.565 million yuan, and the third gear is 896,000-1.008 million yuan.
Zhong Zhao, who joined in 2019, is one of the most senior annual salaries of the Genius Junior Program that year. Zhong Zhao graduated from the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences under the supervision of Liu Chenglin, deputy director of the Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Zhong Zhao's first highlight of his life came in 2018, when one of his Oral articles was selected for CVPR (70 in the world and 3 in China).
The scarcity of Zhong Zhao lies in the fact that he has advanced research ability. Today, when deep learning is still the mainstream of artificial intelligence, his research direction is the emerging direction of AutoML. Zhong Zhao, who was born in 1991, was one of the first researchers in the industry to propose a search algorithm for the structure of a practical network model, and created the first generation of AutoML algorithm in China.
AutoML, simply put, is to write AI algorithms in the way of artificial intelligence, and use AI to design AI. Before Zhong Zhao joined the company, Huawei's Noah's Ark Laboratory was actually conducting related research in the direction of AutoML. A year after joining the company, Zhong Zhao led the team to apply AutoML technology to tens of millions of Huawei P series mobile phones, achieving the first breakthrough in the industry to commercialize AutoML on a large scale.
The following year, Zhong Zhao led the team to develop an end-to-end pixel-level AutoML pipeline, reducing the complexity of the video photography prototype algorithm by a hundred times, once again breaking through the limits of the industry and academia.
A Huawei person close to Zhong Zhao commented that Zhong Zhao is indeed a person with very strong technical potential, but the platform capability of Huawei's Noah's Ark Laboratory has maximized his ability, and the two are organically combined, and one is indispensable.
Another well-known genius teenager of Huawei is the well-known UP master of Station B, ZhiHuijun, whose original name is Peng Zhihui, graduated from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China in 2018. Born in 1993, he joined Huawei at the end of 2020 and calls himself "Wild Iron Man" every day.
In 2020, Peng Zhihui invented a video that can process images and can also be used as a voice assistant and server, but the appearance is only the size of a coin, and the video of a mini computer is all the rage in Station B. From circuit design, structural design, to PCB manual soldering, software and algorithm development are all done by himself.
He often makes small inventions that look interesting, and when they are ready, they are published on the B station. Such as a charging treasure that can play games, a desktop robot that can operate a computer with an arm, a rover made of crabs, and a smart access control card with an electronic ink screen.
In 2021, due to an accident that overturned on a rainy day, Peng Zhihui decided to develop a bicycle that can drive itself. It took him four months to build a bike that would automatically go straight, turn, dodge and hit the road, and it was even equipped with lidar. Peng Zhihui spent four weekends inventing the bicycle. Chen Rui, chairman of Station B, commented: Too strong, redefine the bicycle.
Funny and crazy people can change the world. Ren Zhengfei praised the invention. He said that he would not give Peng Zhihui any restraints, "This is a 'scalpel' he has mastered, and maybe what role it will play in the future and produce some huge commercial value." ”
At the beginning of this year, huawei's genius junior program landed for the third year, and major universities have successively disclosed the news that their students have been selected for this year's Huawei genius junior program.
At the beginning of the year, Fudan University officials revealed that Lin Tian, who studied in the School of Information Science and Engineering of the university, completed the contract with Huawei, and after graduation, he will join Huawei's wireless products department and continue to cultivate in the field of 5G communications.
On the morning of April 24, the official website of Xi'an Jiaotong University showed that Jia Peng and Sun Feiyang, 2022 doctoral graduates of the School of Telecommunications, were selected for Huawei's "Genius Teenagers" program.
According to public information, from 2020 to 2021, Huawei recruited about 26,000 fresh graduates, of which more than 300 are talented teenagers defined by Huawei. In 2022, Huawei's plan is to recruit more than 10,000 fresh graduates, but it did not disclose how many new talented teenagers will join.
Ren Zhengfei defined the "genius teenager" as a "loach" that activates the innovation of the organization, "drilling invigorate Huawei's organization and activating Huawei's team." ”
How to keep fish alive in transit, Chinese and norwegians chose to introduce loach and catfish through practice. Chinese put a few loaches in the yellow eel group, the loach drilled in the yellow eel group, creating a tense atmosphere, forcing the yellow eel to move with it, twenty or thirty hours of transportation, the yellow eel vitality is still the same, which is the loach effect. The Norwegians let the sardines not die on the way, just put a few catfish in the fish, the catfish are scurrying around, so that the sardines swim faster, avoid lack of oxygen, and ensure freshness, which is the famous catfish effect.
For Huawei, innovation means top talent first and foremost. Using high-tech to attract young post-90s and post-00s top talents is an attitude of attaching importance to innovation. In addition to this crowd, it is also a signal for Huawei to convey to the outside world that it still desires more types, fields and levels of talent.
The Genius Youth League is only a very small part of Huawei's talent matrix, and multi-level talents support Huawei's exploration of future technologies.
According to the data released by Huawei in 2020 (Huawei does not have a system to release the latest talent data), Huawei has at least more than 700 mathematicians, more than 800 physicists, more than 120 chemists, 15,000 people engaged in basic research, and more than 60,000 product developers. At the same time, Huawei has also cooperated with more than 300 universities and more than 900 research institutions and companies around the world, implemented 7,840 projects, invested 1.8 billion US dollars, and signed more than 1,000 R&D cooperation contracts with foreign payments.
Hu Houkun said that Huawei's current research and development direction is "system innovation", which is different from "single-point innovation". He believes that today's Huawei innovation environment is changing, and in terms of the industrial environment, traditional cornerstone theories such as Moore's Law, Von Neumann's framework and Shannon's law have reached their limits and require new alternatives.
On the other hand, due to well-known reasons, Huawei cannot obtain advanced devices and advanced processes, which makes it difficult for Huawei to achieve breakthroughs in advanced single-point technology and has to adjust the innovation path.
To do a good job in system innovation, it is not enough to have talent, and a lot of investment is needed to do the guarantee. According to the financial report data released by Huawei, its investment in research and development expenses has climbed from about 10% in 2010 to more than 20% in 2021. After being sanctioned in 2019, the increase in the ratio of R&D investment has increased significantly.
Huawei's total investment in research and development in 2021 reached 142.7 billion yuan, accounting for 22.4% of the annual revenue. This figure surpasses any other year in Huawei's history and sets a new record. This means that for every 5 yuan of revenue generated by Huawei, it will spend more than 1 yuan on research and development.
The practical significance of multi-level innovation
In global tech circles, innovation is both a muscle and a belief in business. It is often assumed that only the brightest inventors, the most imaginative artists, and the most radical entrepreneurs can succeed in exciting, disruptive innovations.
But the reality is that disruptive innovation is scarce, and multi-level and multi-angle innovation creates the possibility of disruptive innovation, but not the inevitability.
Jeffrey Moore, a Silicon Valley strategy and innovation consulting expert, believes that most of the changes that have taken place in big business have evolved rather than revolutionized. He divides the types of innovation in the enterprise into 16 types. Disruptive innovation has many other "brothers and sisters" who work together to advance the business success of the enterprise and improve the efficiency of the company's value output to society.
Figure/Broadly Defined Type Relationship Diagram of Innovation Source: Jeffrey Moore, Corporate Evolution
To a certain extent, this explains Huawei's current innovation logic.
Hu mentioned an applied innovation in HUAWEI CLOUD. He revealed that MetaStudio, a new product on HUAWEI CLOUD, will be released in the near future. MetaStudio is the digital content production line on HUAWEI CLOUD.
In the future, the convergence of the digital and physical worlds is further accelerating, and the production of high-quality digital content has become a necessity, and MetaStudio has been born in this context. MetaStudio has moved the whole process of editing, modeling, synthesis and other aspects of film and television production to the cloud, so that film and television creators can seamlessly collaborate in different places, greatly improving production efficiency, and the content production cycle of a blockbuster movie can be shortened from a few years to several months.
As an innovative application, MetaStudio is also a typical integrated innovation case in terms of the type of innovation, which integrates Huawei's decentralized hardware and software technologies into a centralized innovative application, with the purpose of improving the efficiency and reducing costs of users to complete the same kind of work through the integration of various technologies.
It is characterized by backward integration of Huawei's previously accumulated rich technical capabilities, and through an application integration layer as a buffer, allowing external changes to be made while ensuring that the internal architecture remains unchanged. In past hardware eras, examples of innovative products of this type could include mutual funds, data center management software, and print, fax and copy MFPs. In this day and age, application platforms like MetaStudio are the new paradigm.
But no matter in which era, this kind of innovation has a common premise - enterprises have accumulated corresponding underlying technology and talents before the reserve, and have a rich technical resource pool to choose from.
But if you look to the future, MetaStudio will not be a disruptive innovation, it is just a node and a subset of the direction of disruptive system innovation that Huawei may produce in the future.
In addition to technology integration, the dynamic flow matching of talents and technology products is also a way for Huawei to optimize innovation resources.
Although the pace of launch of Huawei's new technologies and new products has been stable, since last year, Huawei's internal and external concerns have begun to appear, due to sanctions and relatively complex geopolitical conflicts, Huawei can not closely follow up and use the latest technology, Huawei's products have begun to lag behind?
On April 26, Wang Tao, currently a member of Huawei's board of directors, managing director, and director of the ICT Infrastructure Business Management Committee, responded to this concern. Wang Tao is responsible for Huawei's product development and R&D investment in the ICT field.
Wang Tao said that Huawei's product research and development system adopts the methodology of systems engineering. When designing a product, reconstruct the products needed by the market from the perspective of system architecture, algorithms, software, hardware, communications, etc. "The reason why Huawei can achieve long-term prosperity and industrial rotation is largely due to the system management of the product life cycle."
His conclusion: No.
A senior Technical Person from Huawei explained to us huawei's product lifecycle management ideas.
Within Huawei, the product life cycle can be divided into incubation, growth, maturity, and recession, and the management strategy is different for different stages of products.
Product incubation period, the focus is on technology investment, research and development costs are relatively high, but in terms of output is not particularly high, the purpose of signing orders is mainly to improve products, explore marketing experience, etc., the pursuit of profitability is not high.
During the product growth period, R&D expenses can also be maintained at a relatively high level, but more attention is paid to the growth of products/businesses, allowing for expansion of scale and staking land in the case of poor profitability.
When the product enters the mature stage, it is necessary to control the cost of research and development, pursue the scale and maintain high profitability, so as to earn back the previous investment and maintain the overall healthy development.
In the recession period, basically has reached the late stage of market realization, research and development costs are extremely low, mainly relying on stock and inertia to obtain large-scale benefits, profit is an important assessment indicator, at the right time to abandon low profits or do not produce profits of the project.
According to the analysis of the above-mentioned Senior Technical Personnel of Huawei, although Huawei is a whole, in actual operation, each product is managed like an independent company, and there is a very clear survival law of life, old age, illness and death. The advantage is that the company is large, and talent and resources can flow between multiple products. The efficiency of circulation between talents and products can be fully guaranteed.
The trend in recent years is that the proportion of Huawei's products in the mature and recessionary periods is increasing, and the personnel has been greatly reduced, but the revenue and profit have been improved.
Legion: System innovation to solve "agile" problems
Talent-technology-product, these three form a logical chain of the former as "cause" and the latter as "effect", but there is still one link to complete a rough closed loop. This link is "landing commercialization".
Huawei saw its own opportunities in the global digital economy for a long time. Whether it is the enterprise business BG (business unit) established in 2011 or the HUAWEI CLOUD BU (business unit) established in 2017, both are born from the continuous wave of iterative digital economy. However, the digital economy market is a complex, diverse and highly personalized market.
From the perspective of technical logic, Huawei believes that the choice of technology should be coordinated by end, management, and cloud. The end is the tentacle of all things perception, the tube is the neural network that connects everything, and the cloud provides the base of intelligence.
The logic of conformity should be technical, and the logic of organizational collaboration also needs to be refactored. The business units participating in the digital market competition are not limited to Huawei enterprise business BG and HUAWEI CLOUD BU, but almost all huawei service BG and other business units are related to it.
Moreover, the digital market of the Chinese government and enterprises in particular has its characteristics, often requiring one-on-one personalized customization strategies and services, which tests the efficiency of human financial resource investment and customer satisfaction of technology companies' technology products.
For example, a digital transformation enterprise needs a set of overall product solutions, but some of these products and solutions are provided by Huawei enterprise business BG, and some such as 5G network deployment is provided by Huawei's telecommunications service BG, if it encounters the demand for supporting terminal equipment, it may involve Huawei's terminal business BG.
Even with such a thick line of classification, the above-mentioned companies need to communicate with Huawei's different business BGs to formulate separate plans, and finally put together like Lego toys. Not to mention that there are various sub-departments under each Huawei service BG or BU divided in the form of services, regions, etc.
The final result is that the other party often can't find a clue, the problem can't be solved, and Huawei can't get a sense of identity and high satisfaction.
This is the original intention of the Legion.
In early April, Huawei's forum community, "Voice Community", which is mainly for employees, released a message showing that Huawei had formed a second batch of 10 legions. They are: Power Digital Corps, Government One Netcom Corps, Airports and Orbits Corps, Interactive Media Corps, Sports Health Corps, Display New Nuclear Corps, Park Corps, Wide Area Network Corps, Data Center Dock Corps and Digital Sites Corps. Together with the first legions previously established, Huawei has now formed 15 legions.
Hu houkun said that Huawei discovered this problem very early. Huawei has many types of technology and a long product line, but it finds itself with a bunch of weapons and a bunch of problems for customers, and these weapons are usually difficult to solve customer problems. Either the weapons are not on the right side, or the weapon tools are not combined in one piece.
Google's secret army, which was reported by foreign media in 2004, inspired Huawei's decision-making level. In 2004, it was found that Microsoft, which has more than 30,000 employees, is less innovative than Google, which has less than 2,000 employees. The core is that Microsoft's development model is not as advanced as Google's. Google uses the Secret Legion to form a benign mechanism that encourages employees to be creative and focus on major projects and core business.
However, the mission of the Google Legion is mainly focused on technology research and development. After discussion and evaluation, Huawei's decision-making level believes that this model can be boldly borrowed from huawei's business development in the digital market.
Hu Houkun explained that Huawei's legion is an integrated organization, which is not only a sales team and service team understood by the outside world, but also a product demand management, product solution development team, and ecological development team. In addition to product development, other links are included.
According to the plan, a legion is only for one industry, and the task is to understand the customer problems of the corresponding industry thoroughly, and to thoroughly understand the biggest problems encountered by customers in this industry. Then, on this basis, the internal management chain is shortened, so that R&D can respond to customer needs faster, and Huawei's ecosystem partners can more efficiently integrate product resources, service resources, and ecological resources to form a targeted solution.
For Huawei, the practical significance of the legion model is to improve the efficiency of "selling goods". It can go deeper into specific industry segments, improve two efficiencies through one vertical and one horizontal, shorten the management chain vertically, let the research and development more directly understand the needs of industry customers, match the most appropriate technology; horizontally and quickly integrate resources, unite more solution partners, more efficiently provide customers with scenario-based solutions, and respond more quickly to customer needs.
Through this legion model, in the above case, the enterprise only needs to dock with one exit of the legion, and the legion is responsible for combining the required products and services on the "central kitchen" of Huawei's backend and providing them to the other party.
Hu Houkun said that the efficiency of the legion model has been proven in some industries.
The Coal Corps is the first corps established by Huawei, and the coal market is considered by Huawei to be a key digital market that can be broken. In July last year, Huawei released a joint smart mine solution. The solution integrates the industry's beneficial exploration in the construction of smart mines, deeply combines Huawei's 5G, AI, cloud and other technologies to form the overall architecture of "'3 1s' + N + 5" intelligent mines. "'3 1' + N + 5" means one network of mines, one cloud of mines, one platform of mines, and N applications and 5 centers.
In September last year, Huawei released the Hongmeng Mine Operating System Mine.
The mine was successfully landed, and the combat agility of the legion was initially confirmed. Minhong operating system has been successfully applied to 20 kinds of equipment and 398 application units in 4 mining plants and 6 scenarios in Shendong. From point-to-point coverage of AI real-time risk warning and identification and other functions, to the launch of the mining hong operating system that makes the entire mine connected, from case pilots to multi-plant landings, Huawei Coal Legion has verified the agility of the legion's combat methods.
Hu Houkun commented that in the past, it was "very difficult" to develop an operating system similar to the "mine hong" subdivision industry, spanning many business units. In Legion mode, customer data collection is shortened to a few months to completion, "which was unimaginable in the past."
Legions in other areas have also found a point of strength and direction. For example, in the port industry, remote control, unmanned collection of cards, AI planning is a more difficult problem, with the legion mode to focus on key issues to open a breakthrough. According to sources close to some of the core corps, some have set clear annual goals and plans that are determined to win.
The legion was founded in a context of fierce competition in the digital market, in the Chinese market, not only Huawei, but other technology companies have also found market pain points and tried to solve this problem through their own means. The situation in international markets is even more complex.
Huawei is clearly aware of this problem. At the meeting on April 26, Hu Houkun delivered a sincere request to the outside world: the team's attempt has just begun, Huawei has no established experience, and hopes that customers and partners can give more patience and support. "Huawei is a technology company, not an unlimited company, and not everything can be done."
But he in turn stressed that Huawei will continue to explore and use this method (Legion) to do the most difficult and tiring work in the process of digital transformation.
People close to Huawei said that Huawei will also set up more legions targeting important market segments. Starting with talents and ending with the market, Huawei's pace will be further accelerated. This is a positive signal for companies and industries that need to undergo digital transformation upgrades, and for other runners, pressure and motivation follow – and they have to run faster.