What Conventional Wisdom about Innovation No Longer Applies?

Posted on January 12, 2011 by Jeffrey Tobias in Culture of innovation, Innovation, Open Innovation

Interesting article in the latest MITSloan Management Review. It addresses the question:

What conventional wisdom about innovation no longer applies?

It comes up with 5 Takeaways:

  1. Most innovation efforts fail not because of a lack of bright ideas, but because of a lack of careful and thoughtful follow-up. Smart companies know where the weakest links in their entire innovation value chain are, and they invest time in correcting those weaknesses rather than further reinforcing their strengths
  2. Online forums are not a panacea for distributed innovation. Online forums are good for capturing and filtering large numbers of existing ideas; in-person forums are good for generating and building on new ideas. Smart companies are selective in their use of online forums for innovation
  3. External innovation forums have access to a broad range of expertise that makes them effective for solving narrow technological problems; internal innovation forums have less breadth but more understanding of context. Smart companies use their external and internal experts for very different types of problems
  4. Rewarding people for their innovation efforts misses the point. The process of innovating – of taking the initiative to come up with new solutions – is its own reward. Smart companies emphasize the social and personal drivers of discretionary effort, rather than the material drivers
  5. Bottom up innovation efforts benefit from high-levels of employee engagement; top down innovation efforts benefit from direct alignment with the company’s goals. Smart companies use both approaches, and are adept at helping bottom-up innovation projects get the sponsorship they need to survive.

You can read the entire article here.