Innovation: Working Ecology + People Connecting

Innovation entails integrating technologies and other knowledge into a whole product, a whole technology platform, a whole business, a whole company and a whole ecology of enterprises. Innovation management focuses on the linkages and synergies among people, work units, knowledge systems, alliance partners, and inter-organizational associations that are necessary to create streams of new products and services. Innovation management is about creating and managing all these links. Tear down those silos.

First, CEOs must see the big picture, that is, of innovation as a system, and they must appreciate the value and importance of such an ecology. They assume the standard bearer for purpose: What is it that the company wants or needs to accomplish, and what are the reasons driving such want or need. Then, it's about their people talking with one another, forging relationships within and across functions, working through disagreements constructively, and collaborating in earnest to fulfill a shared purpose.

I argue that the foregoing is the crucial foundation for innovation, which underlie and enable Deborah Dougherty's innovation management model. In short, product, capability, business and strategy development, and integrating it all, require such basics as people talking, relating, and working together.

It may be easy for CEOs and their staff, consultants or professors to say, of course, these people matters are a given. However, CEOs et al. may be too quick to forge ahead with a model, process or toolkit, and essentially take these people matters for granted. But unless these matters are checked, worked through, and ensured, any model, process or toolkit is bound to fail.