ABSTRACT
In 1985, management guru and business professor Peter Drucker wrote Innovation and Entrepreneurship, one of the earlier works connecting innovation and leadership. Drucker talked about other sources of ideas beyond R&D, sources that required more awareness of what was going on around us than investment in a lab and PhDs to run it. Ideas and innovations that result from those ideas can be externally focused or internally focused. A board of directors or advisory board should be able to generate ideas based on their experience or other noncompeting organizations they work with, in addition to governance responsibilities. Black and Decker Canada’s Brockville facility used a program called FOCUS, for Focus on Cost and Unrealized Savings. Ideas were collected through the year but really saved for a two-week blitz on evaluating, testing, and implementing the ideas. The really interesting part of the process with Magna was the reward for employees when their idea was implemented.
