Juxtapositions: on nurturing and mainstreaming innovation

Two posts addressing innovation in large organisations in my stream this morning:

Innovations from the edge

Risk and reward: Joi Ito on what news orgs could learn from tech companies about innovation
The director of the MIT Media Lab compares the worlds of media and tech, and says “When you’re sinking, you have two ways to go: You can bet the house on something, go all in, or you can try to become smaller and smaller until you disappear.”

This NiemanLab article is about innovation in the media industry, but this timeless quote leapt off the page:

“one solution is people with ideas working in small teams, and on some occasions skirting the official channels until an idea, app, or other product is more fully formed. Innovation doesn’t always need to come from the edges, but it often grows well there. ”

That’s exactly how all the innovations I was involved with when inside the EC took place. Suspect it’s pretty true of all large organisations.

From fertile periphery to core

So much for finding fertile ground for innovation at the edge. Why don’t such innovations then spread?

Cue a recent podcast by HBR on how the Consulting Industry’s being disrupted, with ‘HBS sage’  Clayton Christensen and Dominic Barton, Global Managing Director of McKinsey:
http://bit.ly/1aOUQLU

Again, while this is about a specific industry (consulting), but the insights into how any disruptive innovation bubbling up within existing structures creates its own ‘antibodies’ apply everywhere (my emphases):

“the organization itself will only identify those things that help the organization make more money in the way it’s structured to make money … if an idea proven at a small level doesn’t fit the way the organization makes its money, it will either languish, or the organization will force it to conform itself to the way it makes money … it won’t come up to the top as an interesting idea if the organization can’t use it”

PS For public institutions, substitute "structured to make money” with “progress careers”.