According to recent Harvard business review Podcast, “90 to 95 percent of all team fail to innovate.” Regardless of whether the statistic is perfectly correct the idea is important. Innovation has been an important topic in team formation however when processes and outputs are measured, innovation is rare. Why is this happening? I would suggest that we have become a society populated by organizations filled with consensus thinkers. Consensus has caused a homogenization of the processes; a culture that drives out variance either negative or positive. I would suggest the basic organizations structure must be challenged. The focus must change from leveraging consensus as a generator of new ideas to a model that if it does not embrace the radical individual as a thinker to a model that at least tolerates him or her.
January 24, 2008
Why Teams Fail to Innovate . . .
Posted by tcagley under Process Improvement | Tags: innovation, Process Improvement, Technology |1 Comment
February 19, 2008 at 11:51 am
Tom, I think you’re on to something here. Many people have learned in corporations to keep their opinions/ideas to themselves and to just go along to get along. A friend of mine used to say, “you have to break eggs to make an omlette.” Corporations want the omlette without breaking any eggs. It’s not possible.