New Faculty Publication: Struggling to innovate? Examine your structure, systems, and culture
N
athan Bennett, Associate Dean for Faculty & Research and Professor, J. Mack Robinson College of Business, recently published an article, Struggling to innovate? Examine your structure, systems, and culture. Business Horizons. 58, 5, 563-569, Sept. 2015. From the abstract:
When it comes to driving organizational performance, innovation is widely touted as a critical capability. Whether the focus is internal and on finding ways to improve efficiency or external and on understanding what the market desires next, leaders seeking to enhance performance will rely on their company’s ability to successfully bring new ideas to the fore. Unfortunately, leaders who sense their company is experiencing an innovation deficit are too often misdiagnosing its cause. Most interventions designed to increase innovation capability focus on unleashing potential among employees; however, most of the barriers to the realization of that capability are created by organizational characteristics. In this installation of Organizational Performance, we report on the successes of a number of companies in which leaders have identified the critical barriers to innovation: structure, systems, and culture. Leaders are encouraged to understand how to invest less in employee innovation capability and more in organizational readiness to support what tends to be an already quite capable workforce.
Below is a sampling of previous publications by Bennett:
Russell, C; Bennett, N. Big data and talent management: Using hard data to make the soft stuff easy. Business Horizons. 58, 3, 237-242, May 2015
Bennett, N; Lemoine, GJ. What a difference a word makes: Understanding threats to performance in a VUCA world. Business Horizons. 311, May 2014.
Kessler, W., McGinnis, L., Bennett, N., Bennett, N., McGinnis, L., Kessler, W., & Sitterle, V. (2012). Interdisciplinary research findings and conclusions. Information Knowledge Systems Management, 11(1/2), 195-203.
Bennett, N., & Miles, S. A. (2010). Your career game: How game theory can help you achieve your professional goals. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Business Books.
Bennett, N., & Miles, S. A. (2006). Riding shotgun: The role of the COO. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Business Books.