Perspective Feb 16, 2017 Innovation Leadership Organization

Innovation happens best in the shadows

Your best shot at real innovation is often furthest from the center of your own organization.

A few years ago, I spoke with the head of an innovation group inside a tech company. He kept repeating how the group was “driving innovation” and “building an innovation culture.” Soon after, an employee in the same company delivered the far harsher verdict: the most innovative people in the business wanted the group shut down.

“Every truly innovative employee wants the innovation group shut down. It steals attention from the real innovation already happening here.”

A committee in the fog

The ambition to make an organization more innovative keeps climbing higher on leadership agendas. The usual result is the creation of an internal innovation group. But if it operates the wrong way, it can easily do more harm than good.

These groups are often given big promises and blurry mandates. When leadership never clearly states what the group is actually expected to deliver, the stage is set for a string of mistakes that are rarely discovered in time.

One member of an innovation team in another company described how, after months spent refining existing products and services, they presented their work to leadership and got a cold response. Only then did they learn that leadership had expected them to explore new business models and new markets instead.

Attacked by the organization’s immune system

Innovation groups often face resistance from colleagues for predictable reasons. John Hagel has argued that an organization’s “immune system” is designed to kill off initiatives that threaten the current way of working. The moment a team loudly announces that it will build new products, services, methods, or models that could make today’s routines obsolete, it paints a target on its own back.

Employees may feel the innovation group is draining attention, talent, and funding from the “real innovation” happening elsewhere. If the group also takes too much credit when projects succeed, it quickly starts looking like a glory thief.

Surface-level survival

Ineffective innovation groups rarely choose to disappear. More often, they retreat into vague initiatives meant to “promote innovation culture,” precisely because those efforts are so hard to measure afterward.

A warning light should go on if your innovation group:

tries to involve everyone in the organization in building a broad, generic “innovation culture”
launches a digital suggestion box that creates a flood of ideas and very little execution
focuses on incremental changes to existing products and services that should really be handled by the teams already responsible for them

Innovation in hiding

To be fair, without strong support from top leadership, it is hard for any innovation group to create genuine renewal. But when that same group is made highly visible across the entire organization, its freedom to act shrinks even more. A group standing in the core of the company and publicly announcing that it intends to change the organization will provoke a great deal of unnecessary resistance.

If you want to build something truly new, you often have to do it at the edge of the organization, shielded from the immune system at the center.

Teams working on real innovation should therefore operate at the edge of the organization, protected by top leadership and, as far as possible, out of sight of the traditional structure. That gives them more freedom to explore new technologies, approaches, and business models that can move the organization forward.