Innovation from the Middle

Middle-sized and large organisations cannot expect that a few top managers can initiate the quantity of innovation initiatives required. The answer is to enable and empower middle managers to be innovation champions, to provide streams of aligned, purposeful and productive innovation acts. Currently digitalisation is a huge change driver and if creates different opportunities and threats in (say) Finance Department, Project Management and HR. The managers of these (and other groups) need to be innovation-intensive, but this can easily result in the organisation becoming unorganised, wasteful and inefficient. Hence, innovation initiatives need to be aligned within the context of organisation-wide organisation development ambitions.