The Innovator's Dilemma

Booz-Allen's Strategy + Business might appear an odd source for counsel on law firm management, but sometimes it helps to do a little mental stretching and try to imagine how concepts developed around consumer packaged goods, apparel, and healthcare, might apply to your firm.

The issue du jour in this article is "innovation," and more generally why so many companies are so bad at it, and what the few who are good at it do differently.  The key is to treat innovation as a process that can be managed like (almost) any other, and to understand that between the inkling of a new idea and marketplace acceptance stand four phases:

• "ideation," which in plain English means having the light bulb go off to begin with;
• "product selection," which means the Darwinian algorithm of choosing, from among everything that could be done, what is actually most valuable to do given resource constraints;
• "development," or moving from idea to realistic market offering; and finally
• "commercialization," or packaging, explaining, and distributing the new service.

Diagrammatically, it looks like this.

Still seem remote from what your firm might has done or might ever do?  Think again.  What happens when new financial instruments are created:  Junk bonds in the '80's, derivatives and swaps in the '90's, structured finance's imperial aspirations right through the present day?  Or, in the area of corporate control, greenmail, poison-pills, proxy-fights, and LBO's were all "new" in their time.  Today, the new issues might be control of intellectual property in cyberspace, labor standards in third world countries, or of course every securities lawyer's new champion, Sarbanes-Oxley. 

Can your firm "innovate" competitively around these new opportunities?  You might want to read the full Booz-Allen article.