Why the United States Needs An Innovation Strategy
As you know, I’m a big supporter of innovation processes being performed by a project management office (PMO). As such I am very interested in anything having to do with innovation strategy. An article in Strategy + Business spoke about a new book by John Kao on why the US is missing the boat in this area.
Two things stuck out:
1. Finland’s success in attracting the best people to teach their children and how this supports innovation and
2. The seeming reliance on a leader of the United States (the President) and tax money to fund government projects like space programs to create innovation.
1. Attract the Best Teachers- first of all I totally agree with attracting the best teachers. One barrier to this is that teacher’s unions do not support competitive pricing structures. As long as unions, which are not bad in and of themselves, fight free market competitive attraction of teachers from all disciplines we will not have the best teachers. This relates to PMOs in that excellent project managers have to have excellent “teacher” qualities in relation to research and mentoring to support innovation in companies. These “teacher” like qualities have to be valued and paid a premium by companies or they won’t attract the right people to PMOs.
2. Enable Innovation from the Bottom Up (NOT the Top Down)- the other area exposed by this article is that leadership of a nation and the people’s tax money on large projects will lead us out of our malaise. I agree with the leadership but not the idea of creating large spending programs like the space program as the best way to create innovation. Recent innovations related to lean manufacturing and theory of constraints (TOC) prove that “leadership” and “innovation” can be turned on their respective heads; workers at the lowest level, when empowered to suggest changes, come up with the best innovations. Time after time it has been proven that management practices, in terms of encouraging involvement, free exchange of ideas, and providing the structure for implementation of the ideas, can be enhanced to support innovation in both products and business processes.
My posts on how a PMO can be used to support innovation are just one example of the type of funded (by a company) research and enhanced (lean, TOC) management practices needed to support innovation.
