If the innovation war is just beginning, then you need to make sure you’re fighting it outside your organization — not inside.
The old way of succeeding in business was to hire the most clever, educated, experienced and motivated people you could afford and then direct them to come up with the best customer solutions possible, organize and execute their production and marketing predictably and efficiently, and do their best to outmaneuver the competition.
But the battlefield of business success is changing. Future business success will be built upon the ability to:
- Utilize expert communities.
- Identify and gather technology trend information, customer insights and local social mutations from around the globe.
- Mobilize the organization in organic ways to utilize resources and information often beyond its control.
- Still organize and execute production and marketing predictably and efficiently in the middle of all this complexity.
At the same time, market leaders will be increasingly determined not by their ability to outmaneuver the competition in a known market, but by their ability to identify and solve for the key unknowns in markets that will continue to become more global and less defined. Future market leaders will be those organizations that build superior global sensing networks and do a better job at making sense of the inputs from these networks to select the optimal actionable insights to drive innovation.
By this point, hopefully you are asking yourself two questions:
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Is the era of innovation over? Or is the war for innovation just beginning?
Much is written about the importance of diversity in teams and also about the competitive advantage that high-performance teams can build for an organization. There is a lot to read about boosting creativity and forcefully injecting different perspectives into the ideation process. 
A few years ago Business Strategy Innovation published a white paper to its web site on “
We live in a world of corporations and conglomerates, where most of the employee class has no direct access to the voice of the customer. The man or woman stitching up your clothing has no idea whether the stitching method worked well for you, or if you were happy with the product. They only know whether or not they made their daily quota and how much failed Quality Control. If the person stitching your clothing had access to the voice of the customer, would they do their job differently? Would they feel differently about their job?
When it comes to succeeding in business, ideas are great but you still have to get stuff done.
In this economic downturn there is more pressure than ever on executives to find new sources of growth, and as a result leaders are increasingly talking about innovation. In some organizations the leader may say “we need to be more innovative” or “we need to think out of the box” and stop there. While for other organizations it may become part of the year’s goals or even the organization’s mission statement. Only in a small number of cases will there be any kind of sustained effort to enhance, or create, a culture of continuous innovation.