“Every idea has its time—and when the time comes, just about everyone has the idea.”
I’ve been thinking a lot about innovation over the past few weeks. Interest in the topic has seemed to come and go ever since Clay Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma hit the bookstands in 1997. And a recent study by IBM’s Business Consulting Services unit indicates that I’m not the only one doing the thinking. CEOs put “ability to innovate” at the top of their list of their organization’s competitive capabilities. And there are articles about innovation all over the business press recently.
So if innovation is so important, why is it so hard? Back in 1999, I got to actually run a large-scale innovation program for Ernst & Young (where I was a partner at the time). As a part of the Office of the Chairman I was asked to design and implement a program for all of North America to “engage everyone in the firm in the innovation process,” which was the conventional wisdom of the day. After all, if you have more than 25,000 smart people at least partly engaged in innovating, something good is bound to happen, right?
Well, maybe. We had some strategic imperatives for the program. Five years into the Internet boom we were losing talent to the wealth virus and struggling to adapt the business to declining core margins and growing regulatory pressure. Globalization (or at least Internationalization) was on the horizon. A major change in the senior leadership team was coming. There was a perceived need to do something to energize everyone around “The Firm of the Future” and re-ignite growth in both the top and bottom line.
A quick research of the literature showed that it was very hard to predict where innovation actually comes from. It’s as often generated by people buried in the minutiae of day-to-day operations as it is by the anointed innovators in corporate think tanks. And the intent was to “embed innovation in our DNA” not to just run a “once-and-done” program to fix some temporary concerns. I was also fortunate in that I came across Chris Zook of Bain and Co.’s work on adjacencies (Profit from the Core) and Larry Keeley of the Doblin Group’s excellent research on a taxonomy for innovation. I also did a lot of thinking about how I wanted the program’s performance to be measured. Out of these inputs my small core team fashioned a broad-based program that gave everyone the opportunity (but not the requirement) to participate.
With some modest seed funding and resources in place, we launched the program in late 1999 and ran it for about two years (until I retired from E&Y in late 2001). Here’s what we discovered.
Read the full story on eWEEK.com: Column: John Parkinson on How to Manage Corporate Innovation
