Make Innovation Accessible

Gary Hamel believes there’s a very good chance that over the next few years we are going to see a revolution in management.  A revolution just as profound as the revolution in management that gave birth to the industrial age.  One of the primary influencing factors is the compounding rapidity of change we’re facing.  Product innovation and speed-to-market lifecycles are compressing, and in order to stay competitive, even relevant, organizations need to start constructing environments which allow product and service innovation to emerge organically.

It’s simply not possible to perform competitively in a tiered command-and-control manner any longer.  To be sure, seismic change efforts marshaled by Ed Zander of Motorola or Anne Mulcahy at Xerox, are indeed awe-inspiring.  Remarkable corporate turn-arounds have historically been about executing on steely-eyed vision.  But that’s not the kind of change that will bring lasting and sustainable competitive advantage.  The kind of culture needed to foster sustainable creativity and engagement starts with something Hamel calls “management innovation.”  Then the process, product, and business architectures that create lasting competitive advantage start to emerge naturally.

Our next live event on Oct 20 features Matt May who talks about making innovation accessible at all levels of the organization, and the importance of creating environments where people come not just to do their own work, but rather improve the work of the organization.  Matt demystifies common descriptors about innovation being incremental or evolutionary or breakthrough, and instead prefers defining innovation as simply doing something better than it’s been done before.  Define innovation in this manner, and Matt says you can create an environment where innovation is suddenly accessible and achievable at all levels of the organization.