How to move beyond the innovation plateau

INDIA: The birth of Silicon Valley is a great example of the power of innovation. In the 1950s employees of a single semiconductor company left to create their own companies based on ideas that better met rapidly evolving customer needs. In the next 20 years more than 50 thriving tech companies were born from the original one.

The need for quantifiable innovation in a slowing economy creates an opportunity for us to revisit this topic. Innovation is necessary to sustain value over time and create competitive advantage. Yet in many enterprises and IT organizations, corporate culture and processes become stagnant, discouraging and damaging to innovation capabilities. To create an environment where innovation can flourish, the executive leadership must define and master their innovation process. Successfully mastering the innovation process can yield positive contributions to the organization while providing an avenue for the IT organization to be a strategic partner with the business.

Successful innovation programs are developed, communicated, implemented and managed with the end user in mind. With sustained growth over the decades India Inc. has progressively leaned towards a functional structure, some more so than others. While there are some good reasons for an organization to adhere to a purely functional structure, "innovation" is not one of them. Specific to India Inc. my premise includes 

- Peer recognition and respect provides for a much stronger catalyst for innovation than management rewards. Functional Structure requires ideas to pass through many layers therefore putting a damper on the spirit to innovate.

- Functional Structure tends to foster management by regurgitation rather than by creativity. It reduces the need for people in middle management best positioned for innovative thinking from focusing and delivering on innovation.

- Innovative ideas seldom occur in the form of an epiphany, but more often get put together by interactive teams collaborating freely, very much like the advantage of solving a puzzle as a group.

- Lastly Functional Structures continue to harbor isolated pockets of information and intellectual property that do not get leveraged cross-functionally.

To make innovation a part of your company culture it is important to adapt an organization structure that is conducive to innovation. Before you go out funding your in-house startups and crowd-sourcing, consider the idea of effective cross-functional program management. Moving your organization towards a balanced matrix/functional structure will help promote the culture of innovation. Such a shift however will require a concerted top-down effort. It is like losing weight, everyone wants to but only a few can succeed without a proper support system.

There are four essential steps needed to create a culture of innovation by reinforcing effective program management.

1. First create a parallel career track for Program Management Professionals so that they may continue to focus on cross-functional Program Management without hitting a dead end early in their careers.

2. Second, have Program Managers working on larger cross-functional initiatives that are slated to last longer than six months report dotted line directly into the Executive Sponsor to endorse access and empowerment.

3. Third, enable employee participation in at least one program of personal interest that is outside their core function / BU. We have not been able to walk the talk on this.

4. Finally, charter an initiative to help program managers become effective in cross-functional roles by putting in place proper training, tools & processes.

Innovation is rarely achieved through business-as-usual practices - in many cases existing practices can gradually start to erode innovation. To use innovation as a vehicle to create competitive advantage one has to assess, evaluate and communicate the overall innovation performance for the enterprise. Ensure that executive management and business unit leaders know the state of innovation - what's going right and what's languishing.

(Dillip A. Thakur is an Executive Partner with the Gartner Executive Program. The ideas and views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of CyberMedia)