.Dust

I have read an inter­est­ing post titled “Put your Senior Peo­ple on Inno­va­tion Projects” on the BFQ Inno­va­tion Weblog.

Really inter­est­ing reading.

The main two things I brought away from this post are the fol­low­ing two sentences:

• cur­rent quar­ter pres­sures had forced a busi­ness unit to cut costs by stop­ping efforts in a promis­ing new area
• gen­er­ally it is the expe­ri­enced heavy­weights who can over­come all the process and polit­i­cal obsta­cles that will occur
• If you want to change the cul­ture of an organ­i­sa­tion so that it val­ues inno­va­tion and new busi­ness start-​ups then get your most senior and best peo­ple involved in these activ­i­ties. Don’t del­e­gate it to lower level staff and hope for the best.

This is absolutely true when talk­ing about inno­va­tion, even if you are not IBM.

Any­way there are some point that I think need to be inves­ti­gated a lit­tle further.

Polit­i­cal obsta­cles. I think this the area where most com­pa­nies fail, spe­cially in a coun­try like Italy. Com­pany pol­i­tics is the biggest inno­va­tion pre­ven­tion enemy. There is no easy way to solve this issue. If you live in highly politi­cized com­pany envi­ron­ment you end up work­ing as a lob­by­ist and the time required to man­age such an envi­ron­ment does not cope with the fast pace required by man­ag­ing inno­va­tion. It’s a dead end.

The sec­ond thing I would like to say is that I am not really sure of how many senior man­agers will take the risk to “roll the dice” on inno­va­tion projects. I have seen too many times inno­v­a­tive projects fail because “Our CEO will not like it” or “Our cus­tomers will not use that”. This is much more true if you live in a com­pany as those described in the pre­vi­ous paragraph.

Solu­tions ?

Well, I think that hav­ing enthu­si­ast junior peo­ple in you inno­va­tion depart­ment is a must. On the other side you need to make the inno­va­tion peo­ple involved in these activ­i­ties headed by a heavy­weight senior man­ager trusted by other senior man­agers. This guy has to be smart enough to under­stand your inno­va­tion ideas, brave enough to “roll the dice”, and politi­cized enough to make your ideas go through all the hurdles.

Why do I blog this? Being hit by pol­i­tics is a bad thing. Remem­ber the Vice Pres­i­dent of Stupidity.

Related posts:

1. Junior or Senior? Ded­i­cated to…
2. Com­mu­ni­cat­ing Innovation
3. The four dri­vers of innovation
4. Don’t be tempted!
5. How hard is to push innovation?