The ability to be or remain innovative depends on the organisation’s willingness to continue supporting not just new ideas and products, but also processes. Continuous innovation requires constantly changing aspirations, expectations and behaviour. There will always be vested interests rejecting change outright or supporting it half-heartedly, even if those vested interests were successful innovators of the past who now feel threatened by new ideas. McKinsey’s “The Eight Essential Elements of Innovation” identified the following requirements for consistently successful innovation:
1. Aspiration: NASA’s success in developing entirely new products - the basis of much of the modern world in electronics, communications and digitization was the result of the bold aspiration set by President Kennedy in 1962, to “go to the moon in this decade”. In a corporate setting, however, the aspirational challenge must translate into departmental targets, if it is to change behavior.
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Most product and technological innovations come from knowledge-intensive industries like computers, biotechnology, health care, and national defense. In those industries, the ability to collaborate, both within and across organizations, is a must. Collaboration has been shown to reduce risk, speed products to market, decrease the cost of product development and process improvement, and provide access to new markets and technologies.Collaboration is a capability that many companies would like to leverage in their particular business. But even though those companies may be strong competitors in their respective industry, the ability to practice collaborative behavior can be elusive. In order to develop that capability, management must clearly understand the behavioral dynamics underlying competition, cooperation, and collaboration.Competitive behavior is driven by organization members’ desires to achieve as large a share of the rewards available in a given situation as their energy and
