Embracing an Innovation

A timely piece in Knowledge@Wharton on choosing innovations. Something we and all enterprises struggled with under the topic of knowledge management and portfolio analysis, Aspects of it can be optimized, but the measures involved are often difficult to accurately obtain and get agreement on. I have seen this done in many different ways, from executive popularity contests to multiple dimension visualizations. The memory of why something was done is often less than objective:

Popularity Contests: Why a Company Embraces One Innovative Idea but Shuns Another

Multinational corporations have a lot of good things going for them. They have built up a rich store of knowledge over the years, allowing their subsidiaries to share ideas and best practices in ways that smaller companies can only dream of. They also exploit their vast global reach and on-the-ground knowledge to sniff out new concepts or products being used by rival companies in other parts of the world. But these processes aren't always as successful as they could be. Felipe Monteiro, a Wharton professor of management whose recent research looks at how and when new knowledge gets the thumbs up within firms, explains why ... ' .