Company-Wide Innovation Is an Anticipatory Imperative

If you were to ask anyone in your organization to outline their daily responsibilities, you’d likely get a list that includes position titles rather than responsibilities, like sales or information technology. But what about something more crucial to the overall goals of the organization, like innovation?

It is likely that employees don’t think of their role as being part of innovation, either for a lack of understanding of what innovation means at the company or the literal thought that their department couldn’t possibly innovate anything of value. Some may even believe that innovation is purely the concern of a sole department — one they cannot identify, but certainly not theirs.

But innovation should be company-wide, not restricted to one person or department. We are living in a time of transformational innovation that features game-changing digital disruption at every turn, in every industry. If you are the leader of your organization, think of each department in some ways as an industry in and of itself, each of which could be disrupted internally and then spread like wildfire throughout all other facets of your organization.

Revolutionary business technology is rendering traditional systems and modes of thinking less relevant and even obsolete. Instead of workers minding their own tasks in their…