Posts Tagged ‘Economics’
There are many companies around who have yet to work out that in the emerging Innovation Economy, what you know is much less important than what you do with it. The capability to translate traditional assets – brand, knowledge and intellectual property – into value is increasingly the distinctive mark of companies that have unlocked the secrets of success.
For everyone else, attitudes verge on the medieval. There are obvious signals of medieval attitudes in management that are quite easy to spot.
One signal is constant vetting of external communications from the innovation team, no matter how insignificant, by groups set up specifically for this purpose. Another is nervousness when it comes to innovators participating in conference programs. Yet another is elimination of collaboration technologies, or a failure to provide them in the first place.
However, the most significant signal of all is when innovators cause outright panic when it is realized they are using social media outside the boundaries of their organizations. It is even worse when it is realized that this is occuring without the express permission of management.
Ultimately, the problem is that innovation teams which share are able to create synergies which often result in the ability to create “man on the moon” type projects. Everyone else is stuck with the glacial progress that results when you have to do everything yourself.
Reliance on trade-secrets and other protections makes each innovation group an island.
The result is that really big, really significant innovations are possible only from organizations which spectacular resources to commit to a category, and are able to fund everything themselves. In most markets, this approach means that superlative change can come only from one or two very larger players.
Sharing across organizational boundaries makes it possible to create much more significant innovations than would otherwise be practicable. It is more often than not the failure to share that causes company collapses in the Innovation Economy.
The role of sharing, and more particularly its implementation formally in the disciplines of Open Innovation are the subject of James A Gardner’s freely available online innovation book. It contains a wealth of material on innovation management, and is a helpful resource for any innovation effort.