Productive employee rivalry can boost innovation

Posted by dinesh
Bangalore: Many companies overlook the ability of productive rivalry to stimulate innovation. That could be a loss, not only has it been a powerful contributor to innovation in the past. To be sure, some companies hold innovation competitions, such as Tata Group's recent Innovista challenge, which generated 1,700 innovative ideas from across the company. But these one-time contests do not really replicate the kind of productive artistic rivalry. Moreover, competition is generally discouraged in the business literature on innovation. Management experts prefer to talk about cooperation and collaboration within R&D centers rather than competition and rivalry.



Mark Little, the Director of General Electric's Global Research Group, says that rivalry also has made a difference in his company's efforts to develop better aircraft engines, composite materials, and power generation equipment. Taken together, the two examples suggest that innovation-minded executives whose R&D groups don't employ rivalry should be looking for more opportunities to form teams, appreciate differences in their respective approaches, and conduct market tests. Embedding rivalry in a culture where what's celebrated most is the outcome-a better product or service-can be a powerful positive force.

The best way to create competition is to set two or more teams working on the same project at the same time. Again, this isn't a new idea: recall the famous competition between the System 360 mainframe computer and the 8000 series at IBM during the early 1960s. Whatever the judgment mechanism, there is good reason to believe that having two or more teams working on a given project can have a strong motivational impact. A friendly and healthy degree of rivalry will spur teams to think deeper and harder about a given problem, leading to new levels of creativity
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