The Surest Way to Destroy an Innovation Initiative by Chris Trimble

There are three, and only three, models for organizing innovation that work.

The first is the "turn the masses loose" model, also known as the "innovation is everyone's job, every day" model. It works, to a point. With proper motivation, you can get a huge number of small projects done. But the limitation to this approach is significant and easy to see: People are busy. They have day jobs, and once their day-to-day responsibilities are complete, there's little left — time, energy, motivation — for innovation. You may get 5% of Larry's time plus 5% of Mary's time and so on, but slivers of free time are difficult to aggregate beyond a few people, and make it hard to get anything substantial done.

The second model could be called the "make innovation repeatable" model. In this approach, innovation is treated no differently than any other business process. You document each step. You define clear roles and responsibilities. You measure. You hold people accountable. Companies that routinely bring out new products and services are familiar with this model, and it works, but really only for incremental improvements to existing products. When your innovations are making sharp breaks from the past, the carefully designed innovation process, which relies on repeatability, breaks down.

The third model is to form a dedicated team for the innovation initiative, one that operates in a healthy partnership with the established organization. Inevitably this is a difficult partnership, because innovation and ongoing operations are always in conflict. With diligence, attention, and TLC, however, these conflicts can be managed. The partnership can work, and this model can get you past the limitations of the first two, allowing broad-scale, innovation that sharply departs from the core business.

Too often, however, companies never get to even worrying about how to make the partnership work. They refuse to form the dedicated team in the first place, and in refusing, they destroy the innovation initiative.
Part of the reason for the resistance to the dedicated team is the perceived cost of forming it. Whereas, if you move forward by simply asking your people to work harder, the thinking goes, then you save money.
Except that you don't. There is always a cost to asking people to work harder. Something else gets squeezed out. The innovation initiative involves the same amount of work and costs the same amount of money whether or not you form the dedicated team. It only becomes a more visible expenditure when a dedicated team is formed. It's an issue of perception, not reality. Furthermore, by asking the people you have to work harder, you become fully reliant on those little slivers of free time. Beware. Those little slivers have a nasty tendency to disappear when the existing business picks up steam.

Most critically, when you simply ask the people you have to work harder, you are locking the initiative in a organizational straitjacket. Innovation and change — deep change — go hand-in-hand, including change in the way individuals are brought together into teams. Doing it right requires breaking down established work relationships and forming new ones, complete with new titles, new job descriptions, new roles and responsibilities, and even newly hired people with new areas of expertise. You simply can't make such changes inside the established organization without damaging the business that you're in. You can only make them on a dedicated team. So if your initiative is clearly beyond the limits of the first two models, and if your commitment is genuine, then you'll form the dedicated team. There's really no other realistic option.

Source: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/09/the_surest_way_to_destroy_an_i.html