Successful Startup 101: September 2014 Successful Startup 101: September 2014 | Page 48

How Good Management Stifles
Breakthrough Innovation
By Markus Lorenz
We hear a lot these days about how big
companies fail to innovate, but the truth is
more complicated. A lot of companies excel
at developing better products, yet these
improvements are incremental. They’re not
the breakthrough offerings that can jumpstart growth and profitability. And companies’
success at cranking out these enhancements
hampers them from getting better at the
radical projects.

that efficiency-minded project managers are
inadvertently discouraging the explorations –
and therefore the learning – that make radical
ideas practical.

If you closely analyze unsuccessful attempts at
developing breakthrough products, perhaps
the most common trouble you find is not one
of the usual suspects, such as lack of topmanagement commitment. Instead, you’ll see

Textbooks on innovation advised them to
allow some flexibility in the phase-gates. Yet
control-minded project managers have tended
to chart strongly linear paths that discourage
distractions – depriving their teams of the

There’s a history behind this problem.
Frustrated by inefficient R&D, companies in
the 1980s started applying standard projectmanagement techniques such as phase-gates
and key performance indicators.