The forgotten heroes of innovation | So Good News

Speaking at the webinar, Monika Lessl, Bayer’s SVP of Corporate R&D, Social Innovation and Bayer Foundation, agreed that innovation should happen throughout the company: “Innovation is often defined as R&D. But this is not enough, we realized that it is important to involve everyone in the innovation process and make it available throughout the company.”

Integration is the process of integrating scattered innovation capabilities and resources within a firm into a corporate-wide innovation capability. In other words, the integration process involves two main elements: “connecting the dots” between all the new ideas that are emerging around the organization; and selecting, channeling and testing those ideas and deciding whether they are worth pursuing.

As Lessl said in an interview for the book, “We learned that creation is not enough… The idea is very important, but the translation that brings it to life and understanding the underlying problem is what we often fail to do.”