Strategic Innovation: Embedding Innovation as a Core Competency in Your Organization

CHAPTER TWO

Reinventing the Wheel

Embedding a core competency is a long-term value proposition. It requires putting in place accountabilities, systems, structures, policies, procedures, and measures that will support and enable the competency long after the leaders who initiated the effort are gone. Real embedment includes ensuring that there is capability for innovation to occur and conditions for it to thrive on an ongoing basis. Many organizations can force the creation of capability or competency on a temporary basis, relying on the will of individual leaders to push their initiative or process onto a small group of people who possess the requisite skill sets.

But real and long-term capability is reached only when the core competency becomes ...