Dans le cadre des rencontres pour mettre sur pied une « cellule innovation », nous sommes appelés à réfléchir sur les ressources humaines et matérielles que le SSF peut consacrer à des projets de « recherche et développement ». Scott Anthony, que je lis occasionnellement dans le Harvard Business Publishing (à la suggestion du Réseau LinkedIn de l’UdeS) avait ceci à dire à propos de la rareté des ressources à consacrer à l’innovation:
Many companies will tell me they just don’t have sufficient resources for innovation. My first reaction to this statement is to ask the company to carefully assess how it currently is allocating its results. Further investigation often highlights that a scarily high number of resources are working on “zombie projects” that really have no hopes of succeeding in any meaningful way. Reallocating those resources can dramatically increase a company’s innovation capacity.
The second recommendation is to […] find ways to spread the innovation load. This isn’t just about running contests. It is about involving customers in the innovation process in new ways; finding creative ways to collaborate with erstwhile competitors, and tapping into individual experts wherever they might be.
This isn’t a new idea — Hank Chesbrough, Don Tapscott, and others have written very eloquently about the power of more “open” forms of innovation — but it is even more important when times are tough and internal resources grow increasingly scarce.
Companies shouldn’t go to the extreme of outsourcing innovation. Complete outsourcing builds dependency and leads to internal innovation muscles atrophying. The very process of innovation — even unsuccessful efforts — can teach companies important lessons. And some tasks can really only be done by internal innovators. As always, balance is critical.
Nous devons développer une culture d’innovation et de veille au sein même de notre service. Ce sont des activités-clés trop fondamentales pour qu’on les laisse de côté. Cela écrit, il est tout à fait possible d’envisager des collaborations avec d’autres unités ou même avec l’externe…
