Session 1: Group 1

Breakout session notes – Group 1
The conversation about the issues that participants want to discuss and present in the plenary started with everyone presenting themselves to the others and explaining what they are interested in. Once the process of introducing themselves was complete, the participants mapped everyone’s foci of research and decided to explore the issue of how organizations change themselves for the future.

How organizations change themselves for the future

Participants suggested as one very important element for successful organizational change to be the leadership. The divorce between the executives and the people in charge of the development of new products was seen as the fundamental issue, preventing organizations from successfully changing their status quo. Because currently CFOs are the people who make decisions on allocating finances to projects, often times they are motivated to pursue specific financial performance targets, which may impact what projects are seen as potential future projects the organizations want to pursue.
In addition, participants reflected on the importance of the culture of the organizations in terms of how new projects are selected and eventually implemented by the organization.

New Product Introduction

The conversation then moved to those participants specifically familiar with the academic literature on the topic of motivating new product introduction to ask what the factors that impact such decision making. Some of the suggested predictors of motivation were background of founders/CEOs, incl. prior experience, compensation structures, etc among others.
Participants suggested that because of issues with accountability and motivation, a deep disconnect between the vision of leadership and the middle management level where the strategy was implemented inhibited the change process in organizations. More specifically, in different cultures the objectives managers applied as criteria to decide on new projects had differential impacts.
Furthermore, management by objectives was referred to as becoming detrimental to strategy to organizations in their efforts to pursue change. The reason was that the factor/component managers incorporated in their measures of employee performance, that was the component employee was focused on and improved on at the cost of everything else. A point was also made to address the issue of creativity and that performance measures and objectives are seen to negatively impact creativity. The idea was that just the incentives cannot motivate creativity and change, the whole work environment needed to do that.

Corporate Entrepreneurship

A way out was believed to be the so called “intra-preneurship” or “corporate entrepreneurship”. Other examples for a successfully driven organizational change discussed was the experience of some organizations that encouraged their employees to be efficient and think about the future not just today, because it has been found to be very helpful to some corporations to identify one or two very successful ideas and eventually to get ahead in terms of introduction of new products.