Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire

Chapter 9. Do Your Policies and Processes Keep People in the Dark?: INFORMATION AND STRUCTURAL BLOCKAGES

The Key Dangers

• Tensions currently exist between different workgroups in the organization.

• Compensation and promotion realities don't support the need for cross-pollination over time and cross-functional cooperation in the near-term.

• Organization lacks a simple way for different departments, divisions, and business units to share information and insights.

• Organization has no strategy for how to bring together people in different functions and workgroups to collaborate on the most pressing projects.

• No policies or processes exist to allow employees to work part-time or full-time on cross-functional innovation efforts as required.

• No facility for employees on the edge of the organization to use for sharing customer insights with those in the organization pursuing both incremental innovation and more radical innovations (or those who might otherwise wish to contribute to the organization's innovation efforts).

Overview

Nothing prevents organizations from reaching their full innovation potential more than barriers posed by the structure of the organization itself. This includes the creation over time of a silo mentality in the organization, policies about how employees spend their time, idea submission and evaluation processes that slow down idea development, and hiring practices that starve organizations of diversity. Separately or together these and other structural blockages choke off ...