30 • 100 GREAT BUSINESS IDEAS
Direct action should be taken by senior management to harness
the knowledge and ideas of employees to ensure consistent and
high-quality innovation.
The idea
The word “innovation” conjures up the image of a process that is
spontaneous, unpredictable, and unmanageable. The innovation
literature abounds with stories of serendipitous discoveries and
independent-minded champions doggedly pursuing an idea until
they hit the jackpot. Often—as the stories stress—inventors worked
in secret against the will of management. The archetypes of such
innovators are Art Fry and Spence Silver, the 3M chemists who
turned a poorly sticking adhesive into a billion-dollar blockbuster:
Post-It notes. In these cases, innovation proceeded in a bottom-up
fashion, with ideas and the drive to see them through originating in
labs or marketing outposts—not from the top of the organization.
However, to ensure consistent and high-quality innovation, the role
of management is vital.
Senior management should take signifi cant and direct action, using
information and knowledge. The commercial development of the
credit card is an example. In 1958, a research group at the Bank of
America called the Customer Services Research Department, with
the remit to develop potential new products, created the fi rst credit
card. This development was augmented later by seven bankers
at Citibank who added further key features, including merchant
discounts, credit limits, and terms and conditions.