Should You Outsource Your Organization's Innovation Processes?
Tuesday, July 8, 2008 at 03:40PM Innovation guru Jeffrey Phillips makes the following statement in You should outsource innovation if…:
“…if you can outsource your payroll, outsource manufacturing and other key elements of your business, why not outsource innovation?”
Phillips has seen too many instances where companies just didn’t have the ability to manage innovation effectively, even though they knew they had to innovate and had the people on staff who could do the job. The problem is, he says, that many just don’t make the time to manage the innovation process effectively. In the process, they fail at being able to generate new ideas and take them through the stages and cycles that are necessary to proving them out. Hence, he suggests that some companies should look at outsourcing the innovation process itself. It’s not about saving money, it’s about getting the job done.
It’s easy to have a knee-jerk reaction against this suggestion. Looking beyond the jobs that might be lost through outsourcing, you can begin to see some of the possibilities. For one thing, innovation isn’t all about putting on your thinking cap and waiting for a light bulb to appear over your head. There are methods and processes you can use to enhance the management of the innovation process. Many of these tools and techniques are based on the nitty gritty work associated with sweating the details of design, testing, evaluation, review, risk analysis, and ROI analysis.
One danger that I see occurs when, in the process of outsourcing a process, the company also outsources part of its responsibility for strategic planning. (I’ve seen situations, for example, where corporations have outsourced a technology-dependent process to an industry- standard outsourcing. In the process, the company lost some of its ability to strategize the appropriate role that information technology could be playing in growing the business.)
Still, Phillips’ ideas is a good one, even if it only forces a company to think about innovation as a manageable process. Ideas are useless unless they are examined critically, nurtured, and given appropriate care and feeding. If outsourcing helps in this respect, why not try it?
- Copyright (c) 2008 by Dennis D. McDonald
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Reader Comments (2)
“One of the oldest barriers to innovation is ‘Not Invented Here,’ a persistent bias of even the most creative people toward their own creations and against those of people who work for other companies. […] To help counteract N.I.H., large corporations have promoted technology alliances with rivals, as well as the concept of ‘open innovation,’ to draw on a wider circle of big brains — not on their payroll — to work on core technical problems. These efforts arise from the recognition that no single innovator or team, no matter how loyal to an employer or successful in the market, has a monopoly on wisdom.”
I have blogged further about this at
http://pardalis.squarespace.com/blog/2008/4/1/mostly-invented-somewhere-else.html
in a blog entitled 'Mostly Invented Somewhere Else'.