Gaining Leadership Backing for Your Innovations

This article is part of our exclusive career advice series in partnership with the IEEE Technology and Engineering Management Society. Imagine this: You have a strong idea for a new product for your company. Your coworkers encourage you to move forward because they believe it could be the organization’s next big success. The idea clearly falls outside your department’s responsibilities, however, and you have no role in the product line. What should you do? Sit and wait for “the right group” to pick it up, or push the idea forward without knowing how or what it might mean for your current position? Such situations occur frequently. Many end up as missed opportunities, even though they could have significantly advanced the company’s technological or market position. Some organizations actively support such initiatives, allocating specific periods during the workday for employees to focus on developing their own ideas. Companies known for that include Google and 3M. They allow employees to pursue projects with a portion of their time, such as one day per week. Research that I conducted indicates it pays off for employee performance. Bootlegging and skunkworks At some companies, managers know such projects exist, but they deliberately turn a blind eye, allowing them to continue. Some employees persist through bootlegging or skunkworks projects. Bootlegging projects have not been approved by a manager or funded by the company. Skunkworks projects involve a small team within the company that has been given authority and funding to secretly research and develop potentially groundbreaking innovations during their off-hours. The term comes from Lockheed’s Skunk Works division, set up in 1943 in a rented circus tent to build the P-80 fighter jet in secret. It took just 143 days. The 3M Post-it Note came out of the company’s “15 percent culture,” described as a permitted bootlegging policy. It gives employees paid time off to pursue their own ideas. The company traces the philosophy to its longtime president and later chairman William L. McKnight. Company scientist Arthur Fry used the policy in 1974 to turn a colleague’s dormant adhesive into the first Post-it prototypes, after his own bookmarks kept falling out of his hymnal. There are several examples of high-visibility skunkworks projects. At Apple, Steve Jobs pulled roughly 20 people—pirates, as he called them—out of the company to build the original Macintosh computer in a building nicknamed Texaco Towers. In Walter Isaacson’s biography Steve Jobs, he frames the idea as modeled on the skunkworks approach. Google’s Gmail system is frequently—and incorrectly—cited as a product of the company’s “20% time” policy. In a 2014 interview with Time magazine, the system’s creator, Paul Buchheit, said Gmail was in fact an official assignment. What the Gmail incubation did share with classic skunkworks projects was secrecy: For much of its three years in development, it was kept hidden from most people inside the company. If you want to drive change in your organization, build a promoter triad around your idea. At Alphabet, Google X—now known simply as X—operated as a secretive “moonshot” lab, kept hidden from most Google employees, according to a 2011 article in The New York Times. Google’s self-driving car project graduated from X to become Waymo, and Google Glass was likewise incubated there. The X team is now developing the second edition of Glass Enterprise, a successor aimed at industrial rather than consumer use. Amazon runs a comparable model through Lab126, which, according to an article in Fast Company, evolved from a small skunkworks Amazon subsidiary into a hardware maker with nearly 3,000 employees. Lab126 delivered the Kindle in 2007 and the Echo in 2015. Then there are so-called submarine projects, which employees work on without permission and despite explicit disapproval. They can lead to disciplinary action and termination. Innovation management Innovation management theory offers a more structured and robust approach. It argues that successful organizational change requires support at several levels, according to “Teamwork for Innovation: The ‘Troika’ of Promoters,” published in R&D Management. The promoter theory, developed around 25 years ago, consistently shows that change projects are far more likely to succeed when they are supported on multiple organizational levels. A good idea alone is not enough; you need a network of technology, process, and power promoters to turn a concept into a fully implemented, scalable solution. First, you need a technology promoter: the person who has the idea, such as a new product, and possesses technical expertise and specific knowledge about the field or industry. Art Fry at 3M would be such an individual. How can you put that into practice as an individual? Start by clearly formulating your idea into a concise concept paper or one-page summary including benefits, technical feasibility, and potential business impact.

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