By: Chuck Frey
According to Robert Tucker, author of the book, Driving Growth […]
According to Robert Tucker, author of the book, Driving Growth Through Innovation, one of the reasons that innovation has not become embedded as a key driver of growth and profitability in many organizations is because it has been limited by functional and divisional “silos” within companies. In other words, the responsibility for innovation has been limited to the R&D department, a special innovation SWAT team or a senior level strategic planning group.
He points out that this is the way the quality movement started out – with pockets of supporters in different departments – but but it succeeded in gaining enough support that it is now a core operating value of most successful companies today. Quality is everyone’s responsibility today, and that needs to be the goal for innovation as well.
In addition, Tucker points out that if employees are not trained in generating and evaluating ideas, they have no way of assessing which of their ideas should be passed along to management or how to sell them internally. As a result, even some of the best ideas may die a slow, silent death in the backwaters of an organization that doesn’t fully support innovation as a core value.