Patrick George When global chemical company BASF launched its Onono lab in São Paulo, Brazil, its mission was to accelerate innovation through rapid collaboration with local partners and startups. But Onono’s director, Antonio Lacerda, faced an immediate hurdle from corporate governance: He was told that his lab would have to follow the same corporate data policies used to secure BASF’s entire cloud infrastructure — which would have made it impossible to partner quickly and nimbly with new startups. Lacerda postponed the launch until he was able, with significant political capital, to arrange an exception: a “sandbox” of separate data for his team, with special permission to share that data through APIs with new partners. Lacerda’s experience, and that of so many innovation champions, points to a fundamental problem for digital transformation: In large companies, innovation teams are left to fight for waivers in the face of business rules that contradict their own mandate for change. But innovation will never happen at scale as long as it relies on ad hoc exceptions approved by senior leaders. Instead, we must rethink our approach to governance and design new management practices for innovation at the speed of digital. Designing repeatable processes for […]
K&X Design and Investment Technology, LLC
Invest The Invisible Impact
K&X Design and Investment Technology, LLC
Invest The Invisible Impact
