Are you chasing innovation? If it seems elusive, maybe it is because your company is too structured in its organization. This Medium article discusses the benefits of a flat organizational structure and how it can improve the occurrence of more innovative ideas.
Innovation in traditionally managed companies often takes a leisurely, circuitous route. Ideas can be advanced or suppressed, depending on the individual motives of a designated gatekeeper. Sharing a new idea doesn’t necessarily translate into a leadership opportunity for the idea generator. And by the time a project is selected by the hierarchy, the assumptions behind the idea’s business case may have completely shifted. Kodak’s failure to channel its inner Schumpeter and cannibalize its own film business with digital technology that Kodak itself invented is a classic case of brilliant innovation left to die on the road to commercialization.
Engaged employees in vanguard companies brim with innovative ideas. Granted, not all innovations are terrific — anyone who has struggled with bloatware understands that. Some ideas represent incremental improvement. Some represent quantum change. Why not encourage, collect and evaluate all of them, simultaneously and continuously, from any and all possible sources?
Incremental improvements, in aggregate, can prove to be substantial. Quantum improvements can prove to be disruptive, even existential. They will, like earthquakes, occur regularly but unpredictably. Science historian James Burke noted that one year after the 1781 patent on the sun-and-planet gear system to convert the piston power of Watt’s steam engine into rotational power to drive a shaft, the economic growth curve in Britain began a steep and sustained upward climb. More recently, in the 1980s, the debut of baby carrots disruptively transformed supermarkets, the carrot industry and consumption patterns throughout the United States. An entire enterprise ecosystem designed to listen for, detect, surface and deploy innovation from any point at any time would seem to have an inherent advantage in creating order-of-magnitude change.
