*3.2.1. Awayday innovation*

The organization is entirely preoccupied with short-term performance and next quarter's results. Topics such as strategy and innovation only make it onto the annual awayday agenda as afterthoughts. They are discussed in an unstructured way and get sidelined if anything else overruns. No individual is specifically accountable for innovation; it is deemed to be a little bit of everybody's job, which of course ends up as nobody's job.

Real innovation happens either at the whim of a senior manager who has seen what a competitor is doing and thinks "we should be doing that" or in a state of panic when the organization faces existential crisis from, e.g., a new disruptive competitor or the loss of a major customer.

### *3.2.2. Suggestion box innovation*

The CEO has read somewhere that innovation is everybody's job, which encourages suggestions from across the organization. The majority of suggestions will be about fixing operational issues and dealing with everyday gripes. If the suggestion box is supported by working groups to pick up the ideas, this can be a great way to channel a flow of improvements.

However, the usual outcome from such schemes is an initial flurry of enthusiasm and ideas, followed by organizational indigestion, silence, and disillusionment.

The main limitation of "suggestion box innovation" is that it will primarily provide incremental performance improvement ideas, which is really better considered as an underpinning of the performance cycle rather than the innovation cycle.

#### *3.2.3. Side-of-desk innovation*

The importance of innovation has been recognized, and somebody (usually a middle manager) is assigned responsibility for it, in addition to their regular core business responsibilities. It is supposed to be 50% of their time, but because of the prevailing power structure and priorities, they struggle to dedicate even 20%. Innovation becomes consigned to the "important, but not urgent" quadrant of the organization's priorities. The innovation manager is more of a cheerleader than an impactful practitioner and will always default to operational matters when under pressure.

In many ways, side-of-desk innovation represents the worst of all worlds. Some resource is dedicated to it, and there is some level of expectation that "somebody is looking after it, so I don't have to." But under this setup, innovation is poorly handled, delivers little, and is visibly a low priority. Perhaps better not to bother at all.
