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Traditional best practices won’t work. You need a stricter, more top-down playbook. by Keeley Wilson and Yves L. Doz

10 Rules for Managing Global Innovation

Companies are well aware that hidden in their dispersed, global operations is a treasure trove of ideas and capabilities for innovation. But it’s proving harder than expected to unearth those ideas or exploit those capabilities in global innovation projects. Some of the challenges of global projects are familiar: figuring out the right role for top executives, for example, or finding a good balance between formal and informal project management processes. But although the challenges may be familiar, the solutions are not; what works for an innovation project conducted in a single location doesn’t necessarily work for one dispersed across many sites around the world. That’s partly because many important enablers of innovation happen naturally in colocation. Single location projects draw on large reservoirs of shared tacit knowledge and trust, and when issues arise, senior management is on hand to make decisions and provide direction and support. Team members

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10 Rules foR Managing global innovation

share the same language, culture, and norms, enabling flexibility and iterative learning as the project unfolds. When a project spans multiple locations, many of those natural benefits—often taken for granted—are lost. Part of the challenge of dispersed innovation thus becomes how to replicate the positive aspects of colocation while harnessing the unique benefits of a global initiative. To explore this challenge, we spent more than a decade doing field research at 47 companies around the world, including Citibank, HP, Hitachi, Infosys, Intel, LG Electronics, Novartis, Philips, Samsung, Siemens, Vodafone, and Xerox. In 2004 we teamed up with Booz &