Since innovation success or the lack thereof makes or breaks a business, innovation is clearly a top management topic. Seen from management perspective, innovation is an entrepreneurial bet, gambling substantial business resources on successful innovation and requiring consecutive decisions whether to quit the bet or to continue and raise the stakes. Deciding on the entrepreneurial bet is a top management topic as well.
Since these decisions are done based on data from the innovation process, innovation quality should be a top management topic as well but seldom is. While management sometimes ignores innovation quality entirely, the standard response is delegation.
Innovation units and quality units receive the task to reach an “acceptable” solution and, failing that, are told to “meet somewhere in the middle”. This delegation technique bears the risk of costly failure. To start with, “meeting in the middle” must not fit business needs or management expectations and seldom does.
This is a preview of the next PERMANENTs Newsletter. Full downloadable PDF will soon be available here: https://www.dr-henrich.com/publications/permanents/