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I. CLEAR VISIONS & STRATEGIES: Effective
organizations have a powerful vision that aligns the activities and thus makes possible
the empowerment of their employees. Clear and challenging strategic intentions (including
specific non numeric objectives) bring forth large volumes of well aligned innovation.
II. FOCUS ON CUSTOMERS: Putting attention on
how to better serve customers drives organizations toward productive innovation.
Focus on internal politics tends toward conservatism, mistargeted mega-projects and
failure to exploit genuinely superior technology.
III. VALUING EXPERIMENTS AND RISK TAKING: Both
innovation and organizational learning require trying things, seeing what happens
and learning from the results. When those trying new ideas are punished for "mistakes,"
two things go wrong:
a) People stop experimenting
b) Mistakes are covered up so no organizational learning results
IV. DISCRETIONARY RESOURCES AT LOWEST LEVELS:
Pushing decisions and control of discretionary resources to the lowest possible level
supports practical innovation.
V. DISCRETIONARY TIME: New ideas and hunches
require exploration before they can be "proven" to others. When people
at all levels have the freedom to use some of their time to explore new ideas and
hunches without having to ask permission, a rich crop of innovation seedlings ready
for transplant to the more formal approval system arises.
VI. EMPOWERED PROJECT TEAMS: Innovative organizations
create cross disciplinary project teams to implement innovation and empower them
to make decisions. For example, a new product team would at a minimum have people
from marketing, engineering and manufacturing. Rather than taking all decisions back
to their bosses, the team members are empowered to represent their business units
or functions.
VII. INTRAPRENEURS: Intrapreneurs are employees
who behave like entrepreneurs on behalf of the company. They are the visionaries
who act. They become the hands-on drivers of a specific innovation within an organization.
Research shows that intrapreneurs are an essential ingredient of the successful innovation
process.
VIII. SPONSORS: Sponsors are people with the
power or influence and desire to support, coach, protect, and find resources for
an intrapreneurial project and its team. Effective sponsoring of innovation requires
courage, determination, and time.
IX. CHOICE: The most lively organizations exist
on the boundary between chaos and order. Like living organisms they create effective
order through heavy reliance on self-organizing systems and light use of the power
of hierarchical command. To achieve this, innovative organizations create systems
in which (like a free market) the choices of individuals and teams lead naturally
to alignment and cost effectiveness in fulfilling of customer needs.
X. BOUNDARY CROSSING AND ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNITY: The
knowledge of an organization is widely distributed - one brain per person. To use
that knowledge most effectively, and to serve customers whose needs are not organized
in the pattern of your organization chart, people must help each other out across
the boundaries of the organization. If a strong spirit of organizational community
exists, people help each other, solving problems and lending resources beyond the
boundaries of their local organizations.
XI. MEASUREMENT: It is quite common to discourage
innovation by the way performance is measured. The most innovative organizations
develop measurements that encourage innovation.
needs a description of what is meant by an innovation climate and why it is important
to organizations and individuals; also needs to be an invitation and link to fill
out our survey on line and find out more
about the Factors of an Innovation Climate.
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