In a recent issue of the RSA Journal, management guru Charles Handy states unequivocally: “Creativity has always bubbled best at the edge of an organisation.”
This certainly chimes with my own experience. For example, some years ago I was hired by a major multinational to explore the stories behind the breakthrough innovations of all kinds that they had launched in the previous decade. We identified ten of them and built up each case through one-to-one interviews with all the key players who had been involved.
It became obvious quite quickly that, although the business was headquartered in Europe, most of the breakthroughs came in countries far from HQ – in Australia, South Africa, Finland and so on. Far from the eyes and ears of the centre.
I shared this finding with the chairman. Mistake. He and his management team had just decided that innovation needed to be concentrated into “innovation centres” where projects could be resourced and scrutinised continuously.
The consequence has been that those centres have indeed produced a continuous stream of incremental improvements.
But breakthroughs?
There are clearly many upsides to centralisation – two of them being control and cost efficiency. Unfortunately breakthrough innovation doesn’t appear to come in this package.
What’s your experience of local versus central in innovation?
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