Jun
8
By:
Jeff Fritz
6/8/2011 7:00 AM
I’ve been thinking about the barriers to innovation within larger companies. As an outsider, it seems like resources are vast but the time required to build, test, and deploy new things makes capturing the opportunity illusive.
In a recent Harvard Business Review article, “The Ambidextrous CEO” the authors discuss how large organizations with legacy business technology and practices need to focus the responsibility for innovation at the top rather than cede to core-business division heads. If done correctly, leadership at the top allows units to defend innovations as priorities against the loud support for legacy projects.
Their research suggests that CEOs need to specifically:
- engage the senior team around a forward-looking strategic aspiration,
- hold the tension between the demands of innovation and the core business at the top of the organization
- maintain multiple and often conflicting strategic agendas
The result empowers the senior teams to move from negotiating feudal interests to an explicit, ongoing debate about the conflicting interests the future of the business depends.
What does this mean for small, innovative, businesses? If your customer is a large established organization, understand the support of your more innovative program belongs with the CEO. Without top support, your program is likely to compete and lose as the legacy priorities take priority in any internal conflicts.
Copyright ©2011 Jeff Fritz