Who's bringing you hot ideas and how are you responding?

Full Abstract

There's an unsung hero in your organization. It's the person who's bringing in new ideas from the outside about how to manage better. These aren't your product and service innovators--those people are celebrated loudly and often. This is the manager who, for instance, first uttered the phrase "balance scorecard" in your hallways, or "real options," or "intellectual capital." Managerial innovation is an increasingly important source of competitive advantage--especially given the speed with which product innovations are copied--but it doesn't happen automatically. It takes a certain kind of person to welcome new management ideas and usher them into an organization. The authors recently studied 100 such people to find out how they translate new ideas into action in their organizations. They discovered that they are a distinct type of practitioner; that is to say, they resemble their counterparts in other organizations more than they resemble their own colleagues, and they share a common way of working. "Idea practitioners," as the authors call them, begin by scouting for ideas. All of them are avid readers of management literature and enthusiastic participants in business conferences; many are friendly with business gurus. Once they've identified an idea that seems to hold promise, they tailor it to fit their organizations' specific needs. Next, they actively sell the idea--to senior executives, to the rank and file, to middle managers. And finally, they get the ball rolling by participating in small-scale experiments. But when those take off, they get out of the way and let others execute. In this article, the authors identify the characteristics of idea practitioners and offer strategies for managing them wisely.

Author information

Author/s: Davenport, Thomas H (TH); Prusak, Laurence (L); Wilson, H James (HJ);

Affiliation: Accenture's Institute for Strategic Change, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article

Journal: Harvard business review (Harv Bus Rev), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2003-Feb; vol 81 (issue 2) : pp 58-64, 124

Dates: Created 2003/02/11; Completed 2003/03/12; Revised 2004/11/17;

PMID: 12577653, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 2/18/2009, IMS Date: )

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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