Angie O'Grady: Unlock Employee Innovation That Fits with Your Strategy

michaelsogrady
Oct 29, 2014
2 min read

In innovation circles, empowerment is now a familiar theme; project teams working highly autonomously have been behind many of the world’s most innovative offerings. But my work with colleagues studying successful firms suggests that maximum innovative output occurs when contributors believe that they have absolute freedom to contribute and pursue innovative ideas, while at the same time, top management believes that it remains in complete control.

By Bill Fischer

HBR Blog

This, I believe, is why creating innovation platforms is so valuable. You can think of platform management as an alternative to portfolio management in innovation – a popular approach right now. The idea that an enterprise should carefully construct a portfolio of innovation initiatives holds great appeal strategically, but in practice it has the downside of centralizing decision-making power, and therefore slowing down innovation. By contrast, creating a platform for innovation means allowing for, even depending upon autonomy – and yet not sacrificing the benefits of having a sound strategy.

There are many paths to innovation platforms, but what they all share is the emphasis on downstream independence without sacrificing upstream economies. They promise a degree of freedom and entrepreneurship in delivery, while maintaining many of the advantages of scale and scope.

If you need a better sense of what I mean by platform, think about Apple’s iPad, a mass-produced consumer electronics product which also offers a base on which other parties can create and capture value with their independently-produced apps. Apple has maintained a relatively high degree of control over how something is developed, and over how value can be captured from it, but the use and utility of its platform far exceeds anything that anyone at Apple could ever have imagined. In a sense, Apple has become the mass producer of a commodity item that liberates the imaginations of a developer community, and a good part of its customer base as well.