The world is a fast and dangerous place. To survive a company must innovate. Many organizations look to their innovation teams, but to thrive, the whole of an organization needs to become an innovation engine. Businesses that understand that dedicated innovation teams are grossly insufficient to maintain market leadership will ultimately shape their respective industries.
innovate：创新，改革 dedicated：专注的，献身的
Creating an 'innovation capability' has become increasingly necessary for companies to simply survive. Many companies have experienced the disappointment of following the popular innovation-mill recipe:
1. Assemble the organization's best and brightest employees.
2. Provide a modest amount of funding.
3. Place this group at the edge of the organization by exempting it from many of the corporation's most innovation stifling policies and processes.
4. Label this group as the firm's hallowed Innovation Team.
Assemble：集合，聚集 exempt：免税，免除 stifling：令人窒息的，沉闷的 hallowed：神圣的，神圣化的
The problem with this common 'Innovation Team' approach is that it is based on a profoundly inaccurate assumption; namely, that only a select few in an organization can be innovative. The recipe lacks ingredients. Perhaps it's understandable though, as most firms' employees have struggled to innovate over the years. And when there is a market disrupting innovation, it is often the product of a small group of people, with a big idea, and the ability to execute. Unfortunately for large business, these disruptions tend to come from small startups, very often out of areas like Silicon Valley, Boston, or Beijing.
Why are the small startups seemingly more innovative than big business? They simply operate much like a larger firm's innovation team. Smart people focused on an unmet need. With no constraining processes and policies, usually a startup's greatest obstacle is attracting investors.
unmet：未满足的，未相遇的
Imagine if they only had the deep pockets of big business.
Large businesses can become natively innovative, across the whole of their enterprise. Instead of a dedicated innovation team, however, it requires a firms' leadership to have the guts and wherewithal to fundamentally change the organization itself. Thus, a new recipe is offered:
wherewithal：必要的资金，用以
1. First, prepare your organization's policies and processes by aggressively eliminating anything that doesn't directly assist in the creation of customer value. A small amount of corporate compliance seasoning is appropriate, but should be added with great care.
2. Add a generous helping of disruptive leadership. Mix into the organization the ideals of:
Questioning. Challenging the status quo
Observing. Understanding small details, and looking for improvement
Networking. Gaining radically different perspectives from others
Experimenting. Employ the scientific method; test hypotheses
Associative Thinking. Drawing connections from unrelated areas
3. Infuse courage and reward the lessons learned from failure. Be careful to extract all elements of fear at this stage. Add incentives that reward ideas and risk taking instead of preserving the status quo.
4. Season with 'gameful engagement' to inspire others to follow in their example. Optionally, increase temperature by adding ways to measure peoples' innovation reputations.
5. Enthusiastically stir, heat and serve. Present with the champagne commonly served at successful business launches.
disruptive：破坏的，分裂的 Associative：联合的，联想 incentives：激励，奖励 Enthusiastically：热心地，满腔热情地
The idea of grassroots innovation, where the whole of a firm becomes an innovation ecosystem, is not a new concept. Also not new is the utter failure of most firms to create any meaningful innovation capability, let alone one that exists enterprise-wide. If firms would address the structures and the innovation-chilling examples of leadership by policy - the overhead and bureaucracy associated with large firms could yield to a culture that is not only willing to change itself, but entire industries.