HBR. They can be hit or miss but somehow I find myself scratching my head over one of their latest posts about US innovation “malaise.” I look around and see all kinds of innovation – it’s just that very little of it is coming out of big corporations. There’s a new dichotomy in organizations. Big Corporations are more risk adverse than ever and are outsourcing more and more of their employee base to contract workers. I may be wrong but I’ve never met a contractor who is going to share their big innovative ideas with an employer who isn’t willing to invest directly in them.
At the same time I see more underground innovation. Teams of 2, 5 or 10 people just getting together and creating. That’s the thing with a digital economy – it doesn’t move in 12 month increments. If you can’t ship in a month your dead. If you can’t think on your feet, forget about it. The pace of innovation is accelerating to the point where a Fortune 500 R&D group can’t keep up due to the burden of bureaucratic red tape.
Let’s forget about this “lack of innovation” in the US because that’s bunk. The workforce is just as innovative as ever but corporations are so risk adverse that they aren’t willing to invest in the talent and time.