You Just Don't Understand - The Conflict Between Corporate And Business Unit Innovators

One of the challenges that every large business seems to face is developing an actionable innovation strategy. In smaller companies innovation often happens naturally. Company employees and founders gather in a room to discuss day-to-day operations. The conversation veers off into a brainstorming session; everyone gets excited. Tasks to make the innovative new idea happen are assigned and off everyone goes to implement the latest great idea, often dropping other initiatives along the way. But, that's OK.

In larger organizations with more developed job descriptions; bonus structures tied to quarterly or annual performance and clear lines of communication drawn, taking an innovative idea to fruition can be frustrating and hampered by conflicting priorities.

So, it was interesting when I ran across this article The difference between corporate and business unit innovation at Innovate On Purpose I don't think you can be any clearer than

... the corporate team and business unit teams are a lot like a pushmi-pullyu - both want to innovate, for different reasons and purposes and have different motivations and concerns.

Corporate strategist are often the champions of innovation. They may be innovators at heart or they may just realize that the key to growth goes beyond continual improvement. Stellar growth requires a constant parade of new products and new ideas, as well as, improvements on existing ones.

However, corporate strategists, while great at cheerleading are rarely in a position to implement innovative strategies. Sometimes they are in advisory or ancillary roles and not in a line position with the authority to allocate resources. If they are responsible for a business unit, they may be so far or so long away from actual tactical responsibility that they may not be aware of the enormous resources needed to actually create and launch an innovative product or service. More importantly, they may not have the authority, which often comes directly from the top, to change priority so that time and resources can be given over for innovation.

Bottom up innovation is stymied because clear lines between business units and the corporate power brokers may be limited or, more often, corporate executives feel powerless or do not understand that a priority shift is needed to accomplish the goal of innovation. Worse, those with the power to allocate resources to innovation may they themselves have conflicting priorities. But there are options to break this gridlock.

- a corporate team focused on longer term disruptions that are suggested by the business units that simply don't have the time or bandwidth to focus on what's next, and a corporate team that provides trends and strategy insights to business unit teams to extend their visibility. A corporate team can provide resources and funding to assist the business units with their mid and longer term innovation needs and take on the creation of new markets or "blue oceans".

In my opinion, this outline has possibilities. It does however veer away from the traditional path toward innovation - setting up separate innovation teams. Managers pulled from various business units and assigned to a group tasked with developing innovative new products. While I agree that corporate innovators have their place. Engaging them in the process and more importantly, getting them to back the project and free up resources I think is a better role for them to play.

Real innovation travels up the corporate ladder, not down. Just give a cross functional innovation team the resources they need and the power to make things happen and get out of the way.