Diagnosing Companies Who Are Failing In The Innovation Economy

Some companies have yet to discover that in the new Innovation Economy

, know-how is less important than knowing what to do with know-how. 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 sign is the constant checking on the external communication activity of your research and development (or innovation) team, no matter how insignificant. Usually, a sick company has people whose whole job it is - called Corporate Comms or similar - to control external messaging. Another sign is nervousness when it comes to innovators participating in conference programs. And still another is the elimination of collaboration technologies, or worse, a failure to provide them at all 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.

Here, the issue is that innovation teams which share able to build synergies that regularly result in the ability to do "man-on-the-moon" type projects. And teams that don't share at all are stuck with the glacially slow progress that is the result where you have to take every step yourself.

Signifiicant reliance on trade secrets and other legal protections of this kind makes each innovation group an island.

It means the really big, really significant innovations can come only from the largest players in a particular category, who can afford to fund the work required. For most markets, this approach means that the biggest changes can only come from one or two established 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.

by: James A Gardner

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