In Viral Innovation an article featured this month in Fast Company, author Chris Trimble talks about incentives to spur innovation in an organization and proposes a very simple design principle to make it happen. His suggestion, which he illustrates with the story of Chet, a successful senior executive at an unnamed restaurant chain, is this: Reward actions one level up from the point of greatest individual control.
The problem, in Chet's eyes, isn't the need to create new innovations as much as it is the need to spread around the good ones that are already being invented and used in individual locations or business units. So, rather than measuring and rewarding performance at the individual or organization-wide level, Chet (and Chris) make the case that creating incentives at an intermediate level (in the case of Chet's organization, at the district or multi-district level) will not only drive innovation locally but motivate employees to help spread those locally developed innovations to their sister units. The result: Viral innovation!
Read more about Chet's story here.
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