Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Certain design choices in a grassroots innovation program help satisfying these
innate human needs. First, it is important to promote a self-selection mechanism
that attracts the most intrinsically motivated employees to the program. Second, it is
important to facilitate the formation of self-assembled teams. Third, idea champions
have to successfully recruit team members to be able to proceed in the program,
which works as a “survival of the fi ttest” mechanism capable of fi ltering out ideas
whose owners are unable to garner suffi cient support from intrinsically motivated
colleagues. Fourth, it is crucial to offer professional training and coaching in order
to boost participants' business skills and competences and increase their possibili-
ties for networking. Fifth, senior management needs to show signifi cant support to
the process, in terms of devoted resources, visibility of involvement, facilitation of
external support, and tolerance for smart failures. We believe that to achieve sustain-
able success, grassroots innovation programs need to be
structured
as a
formal pro-
cess
that simultaneously addresses the three fundamental human needs of autonomy,
competence, and relatedness/networking. In
Innospire
, self-assembling teams
proved crucial to boost participants' autonomy and relatedness/networking.
Innovation bootcamps were pivotal in the development of participants' market and
business-planning competences and capacity. Last but not least, the corporate cul-
ture needs to be ready for a grassroots innovation program such as
Innospire
. This
was the case at innovation-oriented Merck KGaA.
4.5.2
Future Research on Grassroots Innovation
The literature on grassroots innovation processes is still nascent and, therefore,
there are several promising research directions in this topic.
First, future research could focus on conducting large-scale empirical work to
generalize the ideas proposed in this chapter. Research focusing on multiple fi rms,
multiple countries, and even industries is particularly welcome. Such research
efforts would benefi t from extensive primary data collection—for instance, self-
reported data (on intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation and on competence, auton-
omy, and relatedness/networking perceptions)—across a suffi ciently large sample
to allow empirical generalizations of the current chapter's fi ndings.
For instance, cross-fi rm or cross-industry research could focus on the interaction
of culture and process. Obviously, the extent to which a company has a culture of
innovation is an important moderator on the success and design of a structured pro-
cess such as the one described in this chapter. For instance, from our experience at
Merck KGaA, we found that it is crucial for such a program to be tailored to the
company's culture, to ensure a smooth buy-in throughout the organization, includ-
ing acceptance of the program by middle management.
Besides corporate culture, large-scale empirical work could focus on cross-
national differences in the implementation and consequences of grassroots innova-
tion. Prior research suggests that national culture can strongly affect innovation
outcomes (Tellis et al.
2009
) and employee and managerial behaviors in an
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