Let’s take the mystery out of innovation and its inspirations.
Most great ideas for enhancing corporate growth and profits aren’t discovered in the lab late at night, or in the isolation of the executive suite. They come from the people who daily fight the company’s battles, who serve the customers, explore new markets and fend off the competition.
In other words, the employees.
Companies that have successfully made innovation part of their regular continuing strategy did so by harnessing the creative energies and the insights of their employees across functions and ranks. That’s easy to say. But how, exactly, did they do it? One powerful answer, we found, is in what we like to call innovation communities.
Questions to Ask Yourself
- Does your company leave innovation to an R&D team without input from groups that work directly with customers?
- Are your best managers and staff increasingly restless and cynical because they aren’t being given the opportunity to shape your company’s future?
- If you asked 10 employees what they thought management considered to be fruitful areas for innovation, would you get 10 different answers?
- When you talk of employee-generated innovation with your management team, do they act dismissively?
- Does your management team think it’s too costly and disruptive to hold regular cross-function innovation discussions?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, your company probably needs to rethink how it inspires innovative ideas. Regularly hosting what we call innovation communities can save companies money while enhancing future leadership, growth and profits.
Every company does it a little differently, but innovation communities typically grow from a seed planted by senior management—a desire for a new product, market or business process. A forum of employees then work together to make desire a reality.
Innovation communities tackle projects too big, too risky and too expensive to be pursued by individual operating units. They can be created with little additional cost, because no consultants are needed. After all, those in the midst of the fray already know most of the details relevant to the project.
A lot of senior managers think the opposite: that the people around them don’t understand what’s needed or are incapable of seeing the big picture. This is why some call in consultants. But we say this often shows a signal lack of strategic courage and
Get Premium Already a Premium Subscriber? Sign In
Purchase
Buy this article
Purchase one or more copies as a PDF
Copyright © Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1977-2011. All rights reserved.
I’d like to think that the environment that my employees work in is innovative. even though i own the business i still like to get internal buy-in and viewpoints from all my employees (granted we are still small and can get away with it) – even if the work/idea is not even in their department. for example i ask my accounts and sales people for marketing and management ideas regulary, and we’ve put quite a few projects in place already. the only difficulty i find is when a new employee joins the business. it takes them a while to acclimatize to ‘how we work’, sometimes months before they are confident about putting their ideas forward.