What drives company innovation? Innovation is one of those words that ever company aspires to have as a company pillar. Well, maybe not every company. You don’t hear any CEOs saying publicly “our goal is to maintain status quo, derive all possible shareholder value from prior investments and keep this gravy train going until we are disrupted by someone else’s technology”…again, at least not publicly.
For the most part, most companies claim to be innovative, want to be looked at as innovative in their respective space and want it to be an implicit or explicit part of their value proposition. Larry Yu covers some factors in his article, Measuring the Culture of Innovation, in the MIT Sloan Managemet Review.
The quick point is that company culture above all else is the major driver for innovation. I buy this. Makes complete sense when you look at a company like Google, 3M, Apple and Genentech. The article points more specifically:
“researchers found that a future market orientation, a willingness to cannibalize and a tolerance for risk are three cultural elements that have a particularly strong relationship with radical innovation”
Very interesting points since the traditional view is innovation can be judged by a company’s rate of product release, technology enhancements and patent filings. Those are often results, apparently not the drivers.
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