Managing innovation

In our experience, innovation teams feel a hostility toward the people responsible for dayto-day operations that is just as biting. The rich vocabulary of disdain includes bureaucratic, robotic, rigid, ossified, staid, dull, decaying, controlling… and just plain old.

Such animosity explains why most executives believe that any significant innovation initiative requires a team separate and isolated from the rest of the company. But that wisdom is worse than simpleminded. It is flat wrong. Isolation may neutralise infighting, but it also neuters innovation.

The reality is that an innovation initiative must be executed by a partnership that bridges the hostilities — a partnership between a dedicated team and what we call the performance engine, the unit responsible for sustaining excellence in ongoing operations. Yes, such an arrangement seems improbable. But to give up on it is to give up on innovation.

Almost all innovation initiatives build directly upon a company’s resources and knowhow: brands, customer relationships, manufacturing capabilities, technical expertise, etc. So, when a large corporation asks a group to innovate in isolation, it forfeits its primary advantage over smaller, nimbler rivals: its asset base.… The organisational model we prescribe — a partnership between a dedicated team and the performance engine — is surprisingly versatile.