Fidelity's Ireland president, Travis Carpico
Fidelity Investments’ Irish operation uses the tagline ‘Understanding, Innovating, Delivering’ to brand itself within the wider global organisation. Fidelity’s Ireland president, Travis Carpico, says it’s a reflection of how much of a core innovation is to the Irish operation.
Carpico points out the Irish team came up with those three words, to describe what it does. And he has very specific ideas of what innovation means to a large multinational like Fidelity.
“One of the challenges for me is that sometimes innovation is viewed as this proper noun with a capital ‘I’,” says Carpico. “As large corporations, sometimes we can do ourselves a disservice by focusing on what I call radical innovation, when sometimes it’s incremental innovation, sometimes it’s even innovation that doesn’t succeed. Instead of using the verb ‘innovate’, I like to use the verb to ‘think innovatively’ or create a culture of innovative thinking,” and he goes on to cite a recent example from within the organisation.
As a US national with long experience of managing a large Irish operation for Fidelity, we were interested also to get his views on Ireland’s potential to spawn innovative products, services and enterprises that go global.
“I think you can, I think you have, I think you will continue to do so,” he says. “For Fidelity, the Irish operation is innovating, and these are innovations that are globally applicable. In the last two and a half to three years, Irish associates here in Fidelity have been awarded three US patents, and we have another 18 or 20 going through the process. From my perspective, that is Ireland Inc providing innovation to a large multinational corporation on a global scale.”
Watch the full interview with Fidelity’s Travis Carpico below:
Travis Carpico is a panelist at Silicon Republic’s Innovation Ireland Forum, on Friday, 11 October, in the Shelbourne Hotel, Dublin.
