Driving Organic Growth and Innovation

Underpinning of Driving Organic Growth Blog

by Robert Cooper

After much investigation I found four critical components of a successful corporate innovation effort and have tagged the posts in this blog appropriately.

The Critical Role of Leadership
Leadership must frame the overall innovation effort; make the critical resource decisions in a transparent fashion; clear any obstacles that would impede momentum; legitimize the initiatives within the corporation; and, play a major role in setting the climate for innovation.

The Importance of an enabling Corporate Climate
Corporate Climate deals with the: cultural barriers to growth through innovation; the skills required; the incentive systems to create the right behavior; the managing systems and attitude. We have found that managing business risk is an absolutely critical component to a successful, sustainable innovation effort.

Sources of Ideas
Ideas are of course the basis for innovation. Where they come from is changing dramatically. We will discuss this thoroughly going forward. However, you will fall way short if all you do is generate ideas.

The Importance of Process
Process is the final component to a successful innovation effort and we will share what different companies have tried. Within this group there are sub-groups of Managing Uncertainty, Being Ambidextrous and Creating Competitive Separation.

Monday, March 28, 2016

Making collaboration across functions a reality

By Ruben Schaubroeck, Felicita Holsztejn Tarczewski, and Rob Theunissen

http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/making-collaboration-across-functions-a-reality?cid=orgfuture-eml-alt-mkq-mck-oth-1603

Great, great insight on overcoming silos

Companies have long struggled to break down silos and boost cross-functional collaboration—but the challenge is getting more acute. The speed of market change requires a more rapid adaptation of products and services, while customers increasingly expect an organization to present them with a single face. Even well-established multinationals routinely fail to manage operations end to end.The result: interactions with customers are sluggish; complex, customized products are hard to create on time and on budget; and blocked lines of communication make new sales and distribution channels difficult to navigate.

The basic principles for improving performance—imposing stretch targets from the center, empowering cross-functional teams, standardizing processes, tightening up execution—are mostly familiar. But making these things happen is a different matter. In many companies, ownership of processes and information is fragmented and zealously guarded, roles are designed around parochial requirements, and the resulting internal complexity hinders sorely needed cross-business collaboration. What’s more, in our experience, companies that apply traditional solutions (such as lean and business-process reengineering) either exhaust their managers with efforts to rework every process across business units or, by contrast, focus too narrowly within functions...