The People Side of Breakthrough Innovation

Gina O'Connor and her colleagues at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Lally School of Management have studied breakthrough innovation inside corporations for many years. In Radical Innovation (2000), the team looked at project teams working on breakthrough innovations, and in Grabbing Lightning (2008), they investigated the management systems associated with effective innovation practice. The team has recently focused its research on the people side of the equation. In Beyond the Champion: Institutionalizing Innovation Through People, due out in December 2017, she and her co-authors identify nine distinct roles required to commercialize breakthrough innovation effectively, along with several leadership and support roles. One person may play several roles in practice, but all of the roles must be filled if the innovation effort is to succeed. In this interview, she discusses the roles, the ideal characteristics of the people who fill them, and the career paths organizations can design to create a repeatable innovation capability. JIM EUCHNER [JE]: I would like to focus our discussion on the people side of innovation, which is the subject of your new book. You have previously studied the managerial systems for breakthrough innovation; what led you to the focus on people? GINA O'CONNOR [GO]: In Organization Theory, a management system is comprised of all of those elements that create an effectively working organization. They include the system's mandate; its leadership and culture; its governance and decision-making mechanisms, processes, and tools; its metrics for performance; and the resources required, including the skills and the approach to talent development. Our overarching purpose is to figure out how companies develop the capability for breakthrough innovation so that they can do it over and over again. Over the course of our research, what we were finding again and again was that skills and talent development was one of the biggest sticking points to creating a sustained capability in breakthrough innovation. JE: That rings especially true since innovation in many companies is not a career path itself, but an assignment at some point in someone's career. What are some of the problems with the way talent is managed that make it so hard for companies to do breakthrough innovation? GO: One of the key symptoms we picked up in our research was that people were punished for failure and not rewarded for progress. If we can just remove the punishment that people associate with the failure that is part of innovation, then we can unleash an intrinsic motivation in innovators. It's not like innovators are looking for a big raise or incentive comp, or some extraordinary reward; they want to drive innovation because that is their passion and expertise. Unfortunately, we heard a lot of stories of people being given the pink slip, going into the redeployment pool, or being put in the penalty box. Ironically at the end of the day, many of their innovations were very successful. We also heard a lot about credit assignment. Innovation leaders said things like, "I had to continuously remind the organization where that new business started, because the people that got the credit for it were the ones in the business unit who ultimately took it over." The leader of the innovation hub would have to keep protecting his or her people and pay attention to giving them credit and helping them understand and recognize their contribution to the organization, because most of their experience was failure, and when they succeeded, they could be forgotten. Another issue was career path: if you want to be an innovator, if you want to stay in innovation, there's not really a way to do it and progress in your career. If you're an R&D person, at least there's a technical career ladder that you can climb on the technical side, or you can progress on the technical management side. But if you're a new-business creation person in R&D, there's not a clear career ladder. …