Alessandro Di Fiore on “Getting Crazy Ideas Off the Ground”

Getting Crazy IdeasHere is an excerpt from an article written by  Alessandro Di Fiore for Harvard Business Review and the HBR Blog Network. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, and sign up for a subscription to HBR email alerts, please click here.

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How you manage the period between when an insight is first generated and when a concept is judged ready for development is the key to getting discontinuous innovation off the ground. These are ideas that don’t fit the existing capabilities or the incumbent business model, don’t have an obvious business case, and carry a high risk.

In most cases it is an individual who takes the lead in developing a crazy idea, typically the person whose idea it is, usually with little or no direction from the organization. Unfortunately, in the majority of cases, the strong identification of the idea with the person means that it is politically vulnerable; few people have a stake in it and there are no clear processes on how to fund and advance it (unless is a CEO’s idea). In some firms the environment can be so unkind that people simply squash their value-creating insights out of fear.

Discontinuous innovations, then, are not only fragile but they also have no natural organizational protection and direction. Consequently they tend to die on the vine. How can companies fix this problem? Let’s look at two that seem to have found an answer:

P&G established a “Corporate Innovation Fund” (VIP) Center dedicated to the review of discontinuous innovation ideas at Suwon, Samsung’s main manufacturing site, 20 miles south of Seoul. The Center is open 24 hours a day. It has 20 project rooms, 38 bedrooms, a gym, traditional baths, and ping pong tables.

Samsung Electronics has taken a similar approach. They have established a Value Innovation Program (VIP) Center dedicated to the review of discontinuous innovation ideas at Suwon, Samsung’s main manufacturing site, 20 miles south of Seoul. The Center is open 24 hours a day. It has 20 project rooms, 38 bedrooms, a gym, traditional baths, and ping pong tables.

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Alessandro Di Fiore is the CEO of the European Centre for Strategic Innovation, based in Milan. He can be reached at adifiore@ecsi-edu.eu. Follow him on twitter @alexdifiore. To check out his other HBR articles, please click here.

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