While intra-firm collaboration is often seen as key to successful innovation, excessive collaboration can hinder this. Understanding when to stimulate collaboration and when to foster isolation can help firms navigate the innovation landscape more effectively and create new innovations more successfully.
What do 3M’s masking tape, Xerox’s laser printer, and The Godfather movies have in common? These innovations were developed by employees who did not tell their managers. In the academic literature, this phenomenon is also known as underground innovation. From our study at Ford Motor Company, it seems that underground innovation is way more common than previously thought.
The VU Knowledge Hub for Strategizing & Organizing Innovation is dedicated to groundbreaking research and advice on how companies and other organizations can structurally boost their innovation performance and become world-class innovators.