OWP liVe Report

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Innovation is a profoundly social phenomenon

ismore about learning than knowing, and being able to adjust on the basis of that learning. Inhindsight, the title of this article should really be: “Once I knew it all, today I need to learnmore.”

Onceupon a time, we believed that there was anoptimal organizational size for creating inventions I even spent a fair portion ofmy doctoral dissertation examining this, but Open Innovation andCrowdSourcingmade such a questionnot wrong, but irrelevant. Ironically, today, a revitalized search for alternatives to bureaucracy is once again opening up the question of optimal organization size, and the newbest reply is “small, self-organizing and autonomous”. At this point, youmight be excused forwondering, “Gee, didn’t this guy get anything right?” - but the fourth foundational idea stayed the course and became big, and that is that:

Indeed, what we nowsee is that something that I, as an engineer, regarded so casually many years ago, is that it is peoplewho do innovation, and peoplewho adopt innovation. If we can’t get the organizational issues right, nomatterwhat their size, and if we can’t tune organizational culture to outperform, then all the other questions are, indeed, irrelevant. There’s a themeatworkhere. Our definitions of innovationaregettingbroader, not narrower. Theoutsideworld ismore important than the insider’s organization.

BILL FISCHER

We need to knowmore, and to havemore different perspectives. Innovation, today,