Cisco, Splunk, and Innovation
It is a well-known fact that when companies become too large, they often fail to innovate. This can happen for many reasons. One major reason is that a company fails to take into account the ideas that are generated within the company, and where often line managers reject the ideas of their staff, or where there are poor channels of communication to senior management.
And, so, even if ideas are allowed to be supported at a local level, companies can still fail to take the ideas forward as little is done to scale them across an organisation. Government innovation, for example, tends to fall into this trap, especially with the NHS, and where staff often innovate at a local level in order to address local problems, but where these local pilots never go anywhere. A major blocker is often a resistance to change. The term ‘boundary spanner’ is sometimes applied to this, and where a single person becomes the key element to spanning local innovation into other areas. Without that person, there is often no real drive to take things forward.
Not listening to customer problems
An obvious major weakness is not listening to customer demand on the ground. Innovative companies often latch onto a specific customer problem and then look to see if this problem is widespread or just local. A large company can lose touch with its end…
