Page 216 - 100 Great Business Ideas: From Leading Companies Around the World (100 Great Ideas)

THE POLITICS OF INNOVATION
Continued from page 199

The problem, all too often, is politics, defined in this case
as the competition within a company for limited corpo-
rate resources—money, power, or opportunities for pro-
motion. "One man's innovation is another man's fail-
ure," notes McKinsey consultant Richard Foster, author
of the 1986 book innovation: The Attacker's Advantage
Foster notes how managers think, "You're going to take
funds from my superbly managed division to start that
harebrained scheme?"
Veterans of the corporate wars are already wearily famil-
iar with a few innovation-derailing patterns of behavior:
the not-invented-here syndrome, the tendency to fight
over turf, the rush to gun down any wild geese who chal-
lenge the system. What folks who have been pushing
corporate innovation for the past few years have discov-
ered is that organizations, and their denizens, have even
more ways of resisting change. Some are carefully crafted
political stratagems, others seemingly automatic re-
sponses of the corporate nervous system. Some examples:
•The dummy task force. Top management sets up a
group to spearhead new product development. But, as
Synectic's Keller observes, the brass betray their under-
lying lack of commitment by not assigning the task force
any concrete goals, or failing to set a definite beginning,

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