Maintaining the innovation momentum

It happened a few months ago, when I was meeting with some top people from one of the world’s leading consumer goods manufacturers. This is a company where you’d expect innovation to have been honed down to a fine art, because I can think of a slew of successful innovations it has launched over the course of its long, proud history. But these executives candidly admitted they had a problem. Three years ago they had started an initiative to solicit ideas from right across their organization. It started well enough in the first year, slowed down significantly in the second, and was almost at a complete standstill by the third. Like the parents of a delinquent child, they asked “Where did we go wrong?”, and it didn’t take me long to find the answer.

Check out Rowan Gibson’s latest interview on Idea Connection:
The DNA of Innovation, Part I
The DNA of Innovation, Part II

Rowan Gibson is a global business strategist, a bestselling author and an expert on radical innovation (www.rowangibson.com). His last book, Rethinking the Future, has been translated into over 20 languages. Rowan’s new book Innovation to the core (co-authored with Peter Skarzynski) was published in March 2008 by Harvard Business School Press.