A few of us here at Accure like to keep up to date with whats happening on a global scale in all sorts of matters. It fosters a rich set of ideas from which the group can draw on collectively. Recently though, I have found some slightly confusing messages from the renouned business information portals.

I find it odd that on the one hand, a BusinessWeek/BCG survey (results shown on above chart) only lists executive titles in their results on a study looking at where innovation comes from within a company. On the other hand, you have Harvard Business Review publishing articles telling us, “Because so much of the learning about customers and so much of the experimentation with different segmentations, value propositions, and delivery mechanisms involve the people who regularly deal with customers, it is essential for frontline employees to be at the center of the customer-centric innovation process.”

Which is it guys, top-down or bottom-up? Apart from the rather annoying titles that contain VP in them, it would appear from the chart that the companies surveyed certainly are not reading HBR. Have they got it all wrong? Maybe…Maybe not.
I guess it’s easy for someone like me at a boutique marketing outfit to express ideas of “innovation spread”. Its not as easy when you have thousands of employees across many divisions each lacking the time or inclination to decode the complexities of their rich ideas. And that’s just the first part, then there’s getting it into practice.
Nonetheless, one of our axioms at Accure is that innovation should be extracted from both ends of the spectrum and everything inbetween. Good ideas come from everywhere and its from everywhere that yields more and better ideas. Learning from across the organisation should be proliferated throughout and support from the top is essential in forming a landscape that is committed to the qualities of innovation.