Brad Elmenhurst, director of Engineering Systems & BSC IT Site Leader at The Boeing Company, is enjoying the sun after his recent move from Seattle to South Carolina — but he’s staying busy growing Boeing’s IT community in his new location, as well as engineering systems around the company.

“That really goes from product design all the way through PDM,” he told theCUBE during IBM Edge2015, across all industries — commercial, military and even space. “And then I also have responsibility for growing IT in South Carolina and what culture we want. All the way from designing the buildings that we’re staying in to the innovation center we’ve created, to how to bring in a fairly new workforce and then … ingraining them into a Boeing-like company — but making it feel like a startup company.”

Driving innovation

That new workforce, which many companies treat as a liability, has actually been a driver for innovation, according to Elmenhurst.

“I think by bringing in new employees coming out of college that are in this ‘data world,’ they can find data faster than I’ll ever find data. And they have access to so much more, and they think about things differently,” he said.

One example is that his team asks interns to map out the distribution of data across Boeing’s global infrastructure.

“If somebody would have done that in Boeing who’s been with Boeing for 20 years, they would have created a dashboard,” he stated. “These … young adults came in, and what they did was they created a Google Map … and you could just drill down to anything with a push of a button.”

Those new concepts, he said, then flow further up the chain. “That innovates the people in Boeing to say, ‘Hey, that’s really neat; now we can start thinking about doing something like that versus the dashboard.’”

Avoid innovating too quickly

But when it comes to Big Data and the many, many sources of that data throughout Boeing, Elmenhurst said that it pays to be cautious and avoid innovating too fast, lest teams innovate around false alarms.

“I think when you start to look at all this sensor data, you’ve got to make sure you understand what it’s really telling you and it’s providing information versus just data,” he explained. “And that’s really key.”

One of the biggest innovations has been in the company’s approach to the design process, relying on prototypes and customer involvement in the process to ensure satisfaction. “Fail fast,” he said. “Have an idea, try it out, fail and pivot, and then do it again and again until you get to something that is consumable.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of IBM Edge2015.