Originating ideas usually isnt the hardest part of

CHAIN ARE COMPANIES GOOD AT?
Originating ideas usually isn’t the hardest part of innovating. Most companies
are sufficiently good at generating ideas, the “bottleneck” in the innovation pro-
cess actually occurs a lot further down the pipeline.
1
Generating ideas inside
Generating ideas outside
Cross-pollinating ideas inside
Selecting promising ideas
Developing ideas into products/services
Diffusing proven ideas across the company
2 3
How good is your
company at the
following activities,
on a scale of
one to five?

SLOANREVIEW.MIT.EDU WINTER 2011 MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW 49
The sentiment was echoed by the head of inno-
vation at Mars Central Europe: “We try to recognize
people rather than offer material rewards. We hold
a corporate event, biannually, called Make The Dif-
ference, where ideas and success stories are
celebrated. The Central Europe team is very proud
of the fact that we won more awards at this event
last year than any other region.”
Takeaway: Rewarding people for their innovation ef-
forts misses the point. The process of innovating —
of taking the initiative to come up with new
solutions — is its own reward. Smart companies em-
phasize the social and personal drivers of
discretionary effort, rather than the material drivers. 11
Myth # 5. Bottom-Up
Innovation Is Best
There is a lot of enthusiasm among those writing
about innovation, and among those working in
R&D settings, for bottom-up activism or “intrapre-
neurship.” The reasoning here is straightforward:
Top executives are not close enough to the action to
be able to come up with or implement new ideas, so
they need to push responsibility for innovation
down into the organization. “Let 1,000 flowers
bloom” has long been the mantra of big successful
innovators like 3M, Google and W.L. Gore.
We wanted to believe this, and we sought out
companies that had allowed, or even encouraged,
bottom-up processes. We wanted to find cases where
dramatic changes had emerged through bottom-up
initiatives. But we came back emptyhanded.
Don’t misunderstand. There are plenty of ex-
amples of successful innovations that started out as
below-the-radar initiatives, or as proposals that got
rejected by top executives several times. Examples
that spring to mind include Ericsson’s mobile
handset business, Sony’s PlayStation and HP’s
printer business. But, the point is, at some point all
these innovation were picked up and then priori-
tized by top management. Successful innovations,
in other words, need both bottom-up and top-
down effort, and very often the link is not made.
During the research, we followed several cases of
bottom-up innovation in considerable detail: UBS’s
Idea Exchange, Best Buy’s resilience initiative and
GlaxoSmithKline’s Spark program. These initia-
tives were neither great successes nor outright
failures. They were able to demonstrate all sorts of
modest successes, but they didn’t have the impact
that their proponents would have liked either.