These three approaches may look good in theory, but time and again they fall flat.
It turns out that companies, especially the large, well-funded companies that can afford “skunkworks” teams, have powerful immune systems.
For Industry Week
The following is an excerpt from the forthcoming book, High Velocity Innovation: How to Get Your Best Ideas to Market Faster (Career Press: October 2019).
Over and over again, I see the things company leaders do to accelerate innovation often slow it down instead. They encourage teams to be decisive, only to find that many of those decisions have to be revisited later, when it’s expensive to change the decisions. They accelerate the Investigation Phases of innovation to meet an aggressive time line, and then find that the Execution Phases get bogged down. They staff an innovation team with outsiders for fresh thinking and then wonder why these teams’ products cost too much or fail to resonate with consumers.
Skunkworks
Conventional wisdom says that if a company’s people are not innovative and the processes and metrics conspire to kill innovation, the best thing to do is to get it completely out of the building. “Skunkworks” refers to a team that has been deliberately isolated from the company’s core and told to “do all the new things we can’t do” or “start with a blank sheet of paper.”
They’re usually located in a remote building or an independent space rather than sitting with their Engineering and Marketing peers. Some innovation authors write as if this idea is a new discovery, but that’s where storied innovation engines like PARC, HP Labs, and Bell Labs came from.
There’s a reason why these entities have become shadows of their former selves: they were not very effective at delivering innovations that their sponsoring companies could implement, and therefore they became targets for funding cuts. PARC’s best inventions, the mouse and the touchscreen, were exploited by Apple, not Xerox. Bell Labs spun out a few successful companies when the parent company was willing to support them, but the breakup of AT&T also broke up their funding for such wide-ranging research. HP Labs incubated a lot of ideas throughout the decades while the founders were still alive and able to keep the teams focused. After they retired, funding evaporated as a series of downsizings and management missteps led to the need to shore up shareholder results.
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