An innovation-led change requires three fundamentals to be met: market feasibility, technical feasibility, and the appointment of a leader or the chief operating officer who is emotionally attached to the project.
It is the CEO's initiative to obtain outside information and establish technical feasibility for an idea to take the company into the future. For the product idea to get propelled, customer interaction or determining market feasibility is equally important.
After having carefully decided on the project, the CEO must select a leader who is emotionally attached to the project - someone who believes in it and is also highly respected in the organisation.
More often than not, an existing organisation is unable to support new ideas and, therefore, a dream team with people highly passionate about the ideas needs to be formed. This team is generally a group outside the existing group with some shared resources from the existing organisation.
A new paradigm for an organisation undertaking a "breakthrough project" is to set up what Shoji Shiba calls an ambidextrous organisation or an organisation within an organisation.
When it comes to breakthrough ideas, it is not cross-functional teams, but dream teams with skills to foresee the future that are best suited. The members of such a team have to be like-minded people who share the vision with the leader. They also have to be geniuses in their own right.
From an organisation architecture perspective, an important aspect in this process is housing. If the team is housed in the current environment, chances are that it will get destroyed.
So it needs to be kept away from the existing organisation and a board of directors could be created to enable the flow of information back and forth from the organisation. This information flow is important to create a connect between the team and the organisation.
A major part of the CEO's time is spent in monitoring and reviewing. But he needs to be clear on what to monitor and review. It is not the business plan, or even the cost and cash flow that is important: it is the milestones. Once the CEO provides financial and human resources support, the resistance to such projects will diminish.
In the case of continued resistance, the project leader/CEO must be strong enough to stand by the team and its actions. For instance, RoadStar (3rd Generation) was awarded the "Car of the year" in Japan in November 2005.
However, when the car was first developed, the project leader faced huge resistance to the project from various quarters within the organisation. This is because the product was very unconventional and many could not foresee the potential of the vehicle.
Matsuda, the project leader, stood up to the resistance, proved his position with the help of market data where possible and developed a dream sports car.
Resistance to change is normal human behaviour. It is for the CEO/leader of the organisation to ensure that the dream project is given the right kind of impetus, since many are unable to foresee the benefits from such a project while still under development.
Often a project idea may be laughed off as a crazy one, but breakthrough ideas cannot be normal ideas; they have to be somewhat "crazy", only then they can lead to a real breakthrough and an innovative product.
Companies such as UCAL Fuel Systems, Sona Koyo, Brakes India and TechNova, all members of the Shiba Learning Community organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry, have learnt and applied these principles in a number of breakthrough projects to overcome resistance to change.
Dr Surinder Kapur is chairman, CII Mission for Manufacturing Innovation, and chairman and managing director, Sona Koyo Steering Systems.
