Who in Your Company Can Say "Yes" to Innovation, Without Permission?

The truth about big innovation is that you get what you play for. If that looks like a typo — if it's jarring to see "innovation" and "play" in the same sentence or to hear anyone suggest that you, a manager, should play at anything — then this blog post is for you.

When executives create teams to pursue breakthrough innovation they typically push the work down to the operating levels, just as they do so successfully with their core businesses. This approach may seem eminently sensible because it "empowers" a group of lower-level employees while offloading a task that executives typically say they're too busy to handle.

But it masks the fact that executives don't want to get involved in big innovation. Why? They sense that a different kind of managing would be required, but they haven't been schooled in nontraditional decision making, so they worry about looking vulnerable — all the more so because frequent failure is integral to big innovation.

Ultimately, the hands-off approach is counterproductive when it comes to generating big, high-potential ideas and successfully implementing them while creating new value for the enterprise. Big innovation requires the active engagement of an executive sponsor, someone who can provide the needed resources and protect a fledgling project from getting killed by naysayers.

It's easy to figure out who should be the sponsor of an initiative focused on big (not incremental) innovation. It's the person who can say "yes" without permission.

Many people in an organization can say no to peers and lower-level employees, but few have the authority to say yes. Ask yourself these questions about your organization:

• If an innovation team comes up with an exciting, raw idea, who can say yes to dedicating people, money, and time for development and testing, without having to get permission?

• If development goes well, who can decide to spend even more money, people, and time for commercialization, again without permission?

• As the core businesses resist the big new idea because it is confusing and creates inefficiencies, who can provide critical air cover for both the idea and the team?

In most organizations this person is the CEO or the president of a large, decentralized division or business unit. The rule is quite simple: The higher the goal, the higher the role. Boards have authority as well, especially when it comes to capital investment. This is where it can get tricky because democratic decision-making at any level, but particularly that one, tends to sink high-potential new ideas to their lowest common denominators, especially if the board is hands-on and risk-averse.

Innovation should take up a good chunk of the sponsor's time. That was the (not-so-secret) secret of Steve Jobs.

Just as important, the sponsor must come to play. That means visibly making risky "bets" and being accountable for successes and failures. Sponsors can't hang back, assuming they will be able to recognize big ideas when they see them. This assumption can be destructive because big ideas often begin in absurdity. As Albert Einstein once said, "If at first an idea isn't absurd, there's no hope for it."

Here's a story to illustrate that point. Many years ago, a food-service company was looking to create new soy-based products. During an exercise designed to get everyone thinking differently, the participants were asked to share a favorite movie scene. One was from Animal House, a scene in which John Belushi's character stuffs his face with food and punches his cheeks so hard the food explodes from his mouth as he yells, "I'm a zit!" (a pimple). This led to an absurd wish: "I wish we could make a bagged whipped topping that looks like a zit." You can imagine the disgust and the laughter (laughter is always a good sign in innovation because newness and laughter have a common link, which is anxiety).

If you had been asked to vote for the 10 to 15 best ideas from among 500 candidates, would you have picked that one? Probably 95% of any group would say no, and the other 5% would be lying. But the client's project leader was intrigued and asked one of the breakout teams to see what it could do with the idea in a couple of hours. That absurd wish led to the development of one of the company's most successful product platforms — a bagged whipped topping that does in fact look like a pimple. Imagine management's initial reaction to the idea. Fortunately, the managers had come to play, the idea was shared early enough for it to be played with in its infant stages, and everybody won.

Innovation is not only messy and uncertain; it's scary. However, if the people who can say yes without permission understand the need to be on the front lines with the troops, periodically making themselves available to play with their innovation teams, then it becomes an adventure, and it's fun.