"Who's Bringing You Hot Ideas and How Are You Responding?"

Thomas Davenport, Laurence Prusak and H. James Wilson

Harvard Business Review

February 2003, pp. 58-64

For the past two years, the authors of this article have been studying "idea practitioners"—people who bring into their company new ideas about how to manage better. Identification of, and interviews with, about 100 of these individuals led to the following picture of a four-phase process by which these practitioners infuse their organizations with new ideas:

1. Scouting for ideas—"All of them, not surprisingly, are avid readers of management literature and enthusiastic participants in business conferences...They approach all their sources with open minds...They are extraordinarily attuned to the zeitgeist—the often opaque economic, social, or technological environment that can determine whether an idea will thrive or quickly perish...idea practitioners tend to value an interdisciplinary perspective, looking to fields outside business for new approaches to solving problems;"
2. Packaging promising ideas for broader organizational consumption—"Idea practitioners add to, subtract from, or otherwise translate the ideas they want to introduce, tailoring them to fit their organizations' specific needs;"
3. Advocating for new ideas—"They build marketing campaigns, find early adopters, and work to persuade other leaders and managers to 'put some skin in the game.' One way they do this is by illustrating the competitive pressure to change;"
4. Making it happen—"Most are well versed in the principles of change management and understand the importance of rolling out a new idea simultaneously from the top down and the bottom up."

Based on the assumption that every company should have at least a few idea practitioners, the authors offer seven pieces of advice on the "care and feeding of an idea practitioner":

1. recognize their existence;
2. carve out roles for them;
3. give them license;
4. reward them—carefully;
5. get into the ideas;
6. run occasional interference; and
7. create an idea-friendly culture.

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