Page 220 - 100 Great Business Ideas: From Leading Companies Around the World (100 Great Ideas)

THE POLITICS OF INNOVATION

cot/tin:let/front page 203

pensate innovators: phantom stock in the venture, even
special employment contracts to take the folks out of the
standard pay hierarchy. Won't others in the company be
envious? They might, except for one wrinkle: At the cut-
ting edge of thinking on the subject, the emerging wis-
dom is that you should require would-be innovators to
put something of their own at risk in a startup. Like
money, or maybe even their jobs. For instance, you might
make them buy in, literally, by paying for that phantom
stock.

To be sure, this runs counter to much current thinking
on innovation, all the stuff that says that only when em-
ployees feel secure about their jobs will they take the risk
of proposing new ideas. But Foster and Kuczmarski keep
coming back to a single word in describing what it truly
takes to get a venture up and running: tough. It's tough;
you have to be tough. At the very least, tough enough to
cut through the politics.

Source: Walter Kiechel III, "The Politics of Innovation," Fortune, (April 11, 1988), pp. 131-
132., 0 1988 Time Inc. All rights reserved.

CONTROL

No specific techniques are presented here. Several of the
approaches described in Chapter 3 are control techniques.
Traditional control activities overlap with analyzing the en-
vironment and identifying and recognizing the problem.
Benchmarking and best practices, for example, are control
activities as well as creative ways of scanning the environ-
ment. Similarly, Camelot fulfills the conceptual model of
control, that is, set standards, measure performance, com-
pare the two, and then take the necessary corrective actions.