What percentage of your company should be actively engaged in innovation?
Following the webinar I did with Cris Beswick, Andrew Sandford asked:
My question is that if you were asked by these leaders of global brands what % of our organization or teams do we need actively engaged in innovation? Bruno Pešec what about you and Katie Anderson do you have an opinion what do Toyota aim for(i think I know the answer)? 25% engagement is a stat bounced about for a successful change. I am intrigued. What does anyone else think.
Here is my brief reply, expanded with further reading for each point:
- Continuous improvement mindset and practices enable and enhance innovation. Latter can exists without the former, but that is rather sad existence.
- Everybody should have the right to innovate (e.g. propose and submit ideas), but not everybody should be measured on innovation performance. Creativity does not discriminate.
- I'm a pragmatist, not dogmatist. Picking a set % for structural change seems more dogmatic/cargo-cultish than pragmatic. Each organisation is unique, each market is different.
- When organisation has a clear strategy, with a joint understanding of how innovation fits in, then they can play with different structures to find which one works best for them. In that period of time.
- Back to continuous improvement, as that one seems to be much simpler dilemma: everybody, everywhere, everyday.
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