Is Innovation Everybody’s Business?
Posted on Tue, Feb 22, 2011
Ask ‘Who owns innovation at your organization?’ and the responses will vary based on who you ask and how you define innovation. Management, the R&D team, the innovation department, product teams, marketing?
The National Council of French Engineers and Scientists (CNISF) published a study conducted around the perception of Innovation of 500 engineers. To the question “who represents Innovation in the company?”, the answers are: 30% the Top Management, 20% Innovation Managers, 20% nobody and 30% everybody.
The reality is: innovation is a distributed function. Is that a bad thing? A recent MIT Sloan Management Review article, The 5 Myths of Innovation, argues that innovation must be both top-down and bottom-up. Directives from the C-Suite can be seen as disconnected from the innovation process, but examples of companies who have successfully built innovation engines from the bottom-up were, according those that penned the article, hard if not impossible to come by.
And while it’s tempting to say innovation is everybody’s business, is it practical or even achievable? Suggestion boxes, polls, ideation programs and web-based forums fall short. According to a McKinsey survey around web-based tools for idea capture and development, respondents who are satisfied overall with the Web 2.0 tools (21%) is slightly outweighed by the number who voice clear dissatisfaction (22%).
How then, can an organization best identify the stakeholders in innovation and ensure that innovation priorities of those at the top are connected to the efforts and deliverables of those lower down in the organization. And how, too, can those doing the daily job of innovation be knowledge-enabled and made more efficient in those tasks?
For starters, companies should develop an Innovation Center of Excellence. The charter of the Innovation Center of Excellence is to drive the successful deployment of innovation best practices in support of the organization’s goals. It will execute to this charter by bringing uniformity, repeatability, and best practices to innovation across all domains of the organization. This ‘centralized’ corporate innovation office will help develop innovation best practice skills at every level of the organization. An Innovation Center of Excellence brings focus and visibility to organization’s innovation agenda, and with proper execution it will build the momentum needed to establish a self-sustaining innovation culture.