
Before the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday, I paid a visit to a Fortune 100 company and sat with a fellow chartered with looking at how to bring innovation technology into the company. My visit was both interesting and enlightening.
This manager—I’ll call him Bob—was very emphatic in his desire to find a way to bring sustainable innovation practices to his company. Bob understood the potential value of deploying innovation best practices and how it could help his company build shareholder value. Bob understood the need to connect individual innovation workers and communities of practice together and mobilize internal and external knowledge resources to support a broad and living ecosystem of collaborative innovation.
So, you would think that Bob was all set to get cracking on building the infrastructure to support the culture of sustainable innovation he envisioned. Whoa there big fella! Not so fast.
It seems that Bob didn’t want to share ownership of the innovation agenda. He didn’t want to bring the people who owned the responsibility for delivering on the corporation’s product and market objectives into the conversation. Instead, Bob wanted to control the company’s innovation initiative from his venue of corporate IT. This is a big mistake.
Introduction of any new system of practices into an organization requires the buy in of all affected constituencies. This is true for all such initiatives and no less so for sustainable innovation initiatives. By controlling the agenda with an iron fist, Bob is dooming his initiative before it even gets off the ground. At best he will achieve slow, half-hearted adoption of the practice system he proposes to his communities of innovation workers. At worst, he could absolutely kill for years to come the chances for successfully building a high performance innovation culture in his company.
In the innovation game, delay comes at a very high cost. Bob’s choice comes with very dear cost in shareholder value.
If you are sitting in Bob’s position, don’t repeat his mistake. Be inclusive and share the wealth. By building bridges to your constituencies early and often, you will develop a pool of innovation champions that will help you raise the standard of sustainable innovation for your organization.
If you are one of Bob’s potential constituents and you understand the need to build strong innovation competence, you had better find out who is the Bob in your company and what is being done to expedite bringing innovation skills, tools, and practices in rapidly.









HBS on Global Innovation Best Practices
A very nice piece appears on the Harvard Business School Working Knowledge site this week. The article, “Best Practices of Global Innovators”, discusses some recently publish work by HBS Professor Alan D. MacCormack on how global innovators manage effective collaboration for innovation.
MacCormack cites three drivers of the collaborative trend: growing product complexity, the economic incentives of partnering with companies in emerging geographies, and the enabling influence of technology. As a result, he says companies are increasing looking to global partnering as a way to bring more innovation to the table.
At the top of his list of critical principle needed to succeed at global innovation partnering is alignment. That is ensuring that your innovation initiatives are aligned with your business objectives. Of course, this is also true of home grown innovation too. Innovations that are not aligned with corporate objectives will usual end up on the trash heap of failed distractions.
But there is more that global innovation and internal innovation competence have in common. MacCormack identifies people, process, platforms, and programs as the four keys areas of investment for firms to develop their innovation capabilities. As we have discussed in numerous posts here, these are fundamental elements of a true innovation culture.
The article is both meaningful in its take on collaborative and its relevance to development of internal innovation competence as well. I recommend giving it a read.
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