The focus that turns innovation from gurgle to Google

“Just How Valuable Is Google’s 20% Time?” asks Michael Schrage on the Harvard Business Review blog.

Whether 20% time is right or wrong, the core issue around disruptive innovation is to actually give it attention.  Most companies don’t.  Day-to-day survival mode usually elbows aside time for strategic thinking about the future, and yet many executives either assume or hope that big ideas will just emerge regardless.

Innovation needs intentional focus – whether that’s a set of strategic questions that every employee is continually trying to solve; or a workplace that is strategically designed to encourage serendipitous innovation collisions; or a chunk of time that you get to play with as you wish…whatever approaches you want to take, you need to do something deliberate to pull more of tomorrow into today.