Is there any professional effort that requires more courage than innovating? Innovation tomes frequently focus on the creative aspects of product and service development, but that is only half of the equation. Execution is required to make a creative idea into an actual innovation. “Execution” is a funny word. It has two meanings: 1) the manner in which something is accomplished, and 2) the carrying out of a death sentence. When I say, “execution is required,” you probably th

Quick story: I had been working on a project to bring a new-to-the-world product to market for two years. Like the dozen or so others on the team, I frequently worked long hours. We worked as a tight unit, and got the product successfully to market on time, and on budget. At the company’s annual awards ceremony that year, I…did nothing. I wasn’t invited. Nor were most of my teammates. There was an imposed limit of five people per team award, so only the five top managers rece

As demonstrated in Part 1 of this blog series, of the three forms of managerial control – market (financial), bureaucratic (command), and clan (social) – the mechanism that leads to the best innovation outcome is clan control. Now, as a manager of innovators, you may be saying to yourself “Great! Now what?” First,…get yourself a clan. I know, that sounds obvious, but it’s a reality: no clan, no clan control. So turn your innovation team into an innovation clan. Okay! How? Wha

How do you manage a team of innovators? No that’s not the start of a joke. It’s a serious question. Do you take a command-and-control approach? Do you try to motivate innovation with financial incentives? If only it were that easy. Research from various fields adds up to suggest that effective management of innovators requires a different approach. In the Journal of Product Innovation Management, researchers show that of three managerial control mechanisms – market (financial