Not Invented Here

The “Not Invented Here” phenomenon - often lurks in the organization’s shadows.

Our ability to see into the future is limited, but through past patterns, we can paint a picture of possible future scenarios, and what we can learn from them.

During the early stages of an organization, often the founders and a few others drive the vision and growth of the nascent and early growth organization. Once the organization has reached a certain critical mass, more people need to be brought into the “management” ranks, and so on. Not all carry with them the founder’s mentality or the experience. Soon, the organization starts to sputter. A lot of focus and energy is spent internally, all the while the external environment continues to evolve. Soon the organization finds itself falling behind newer and smaller organizations with far fewer resources. Does this sound familiar? 

This unfortunately is not an uncommon cycle. And the “canary in the coal mine” for this is the “Not Invented Here” syndrome.

One prominent example is the story of now $Trillion Microsoft and then IBM of the 1970s. Back then the IBM management did not believe the PC market was going to amount to anything. Likewise, there are many such examples across many industries, particularly in fast clock speed industries.

In the organizational context, Charles Fine has written - Evolutionary Pressures Spawn New Hybrids creating a constant stream of new competitors. The bio-mimicry, particularly in today’s COVID-19 pandemic is not lost here. Much like new mutations of the deadly virus are emerging, a similar analogy applies to organizational life cycles as well.

So how should an organization continually stay on a renewal path? 

One leading concept that has been adopted by TCS is the COIN (Co-Innovation Network) model. Through an ecosystem of innovation collaborations, it harnesses the power of innovation ecosystems to continually rejuvenate the innovation engine.

Along similar lines, Cisco and a few other companies adopted a partnership strategy for specific areas of interest, such as the Open Fog Consortium and Open Ledger project to keep abreast of external developments in fast emerging areas as well as has reinforced its internal diversity initiatives. Eli Lilly, a Pharmaceutical giant, led to the launch of Innocentive, a crowd-sourced innovation platform.

In the digital age with increasing industry clock speeds, the competitive business advantage is increasingly fleeting. In an age of increasing pace of innovation, the fleetingness of competitive advantage is only becoming more acute.

How is your organization staying on the renewal path? What other models for continual innovation and business renewal are you seeing?