Flipping through the print edition of the Wall Street Journal, it's interesting to see that Google is reorganizing its effort to leverage the ideas its employees come up with. The fact that Google encourages its staff to take one work day a week to work on projects that are not related to their jobs has led to some interesting innovations. But how do you harness the value of those ideas? After all, Twitter was developed by former Google employees. If your Google, you harness those ideas by managing your innovation resources. Here, the company has drawn more dotted lines to senior management and executives and a process is developed that lets innovation easily trickle up for review by executives.
This process certainly puts more responsibility on senior management and executives, but when your competitors are biting at your heels and you've invested a lot on employing the best of the best, you want to make sure that very little or none of the innovation you're paying for slips away. This issue of managing innovation, also marks a unique problem for rapidly growing companies and intellectual property.
