When a CEO announces a major initiative to foster innovation, mark your calendar. Three years later, many of these ambitious ventures will have quietly expired without an obituary. Among those that have met that fate in recent months are initiatives at Target, Alaska Airlines, Coca-Cola, the New York Times, and Chubb.
When a CEO announces a major initiative to foster innovation, mark your calendar. Three years later, many of these ambitious ventures will have quietly expired without an obituary. The problems arise when projects need to be transferred to the business units for a large-scale launch. To make the intertwined model work, some companies are rotating business-side people through the innovation group — often to provide commercial expertise, or help make introductions to customers who might be willing to test something new and provide feedback. Or they are exporting innovation team members to the business unit that will be responsible for launching a project, so there’s someone involved who is knowledgeable and passionate about it. “Don’t call it a hand-off,” one survey respondent advised. “It needs to be a transition.”