Social Glass

I wrote a while ago about the “Innovation Maturity Model” and how ECM etc. is required to harness innovative ideas and turn them into corporate policy and strategy. What I didn’t focus on was all of those innovative ideas that don’t mature and the people behind them.

Essentially, businesses don’t have enough energy or resources to commercialize every innovative idea that knowledge workers might come up with. Innovative ideas must be assessed against corporate direction and market needs. Of those candidate ideas that make business sense only a few will get actual business focus.

This means discouragement - a lot of people with good ideas will never see them realized (at least with their current employer), and this poses a problem for the enterprise as continued discouragement often leads to high attrition rates.

How, then, does the enterprise create an ecosystem that produces innovative ideas when it can adopt so few? How does the enterprise keep from discouraging its bright and innovative knowledge workers?

I’m afraid I don’t know the answer to these questions and I see this as a real threat to the longevity of an Enterprise 2.0 ecosystem within a given corporation.  Thoughts on this topic are most welcome.