Author: Polly LaBarre

Remember that classic New Yorker cartoon with Rover sitting in front of a computer? The caption read, “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog.” Well, on the web, no one knows you’re a senior vice president either. That’s why every leader is going to have to learn how to get things done in a world where authority is the reciprocal of followership.

As traditional hierarchies get supplanted by networked, or “social” organizations, leadership will become less a function of “where you sit,” than of “what you can do.” Any company that strives to build a leadership advantage will need more than a celebrity CEO and a corporate university that serves up tasty educational morsels to the “high potentials.” It will need an organizational model that gives everyone the chance to lead if they’re capable; and a talent development model that helps everyone to become capable.

What does it take to dramatically enlarge the leadership capacity of an organization — and equip all of its people to lead without formal authority?

Those are the questions behind the Leaders Everywhere Challenge, the second leg of the Harvard Business Review/McKinsey M-Prize for Management Innovation. And today we’re proud to announce the eighteen finalists. This is a robust collection of real-world case studies and courageous experiments in rethinking the work of leadership, redistributing power, and unleashing 21st century leadership skills. Here they are in alphabetical order:

Biggest-Ever Day of Collective Action to Improve Healthcare That Started With a Tweet
Story by Helen Bevan, Damian Roland, Jackie Lynton, Pollyanna Jones

Using Micro-Learning to Boost Influence Skills in Emergent Leaders
Story by Mark Clare

Reweaving Corporate DNA: Building a Culture of Design Thinking at Citrix
Story by Catherine Courage

Teaming at GE Aviation
Story by Rasheedah Jones

The System of Leadership
Hack by Monique Jordan

Total Volunteer Force for the U.S. Military
Hack by Timothy Kane

A Tale of Two Captains: Making the Case for the Universal Applicability of Leaders Everywhere
Story by Charlie Kim and David Marquet

Don’t Remove Their Igloos!
Story by Peter King

Co-Presidents: Distributed Leadership at The Nerdery
Story by Mark Malmberg

The Power of Employees to Overcome the Bank Crisis
Story by Valerie Martens

The 4-Hat Hack: How a Micro Change in Your Employee Portal Can Yield Mega Results in Leadership
Hack by Joel Modestus

Rap a Tap, Tap Tap, Join TITAN and You Are the Leader
Story by Lalgudi Ramanathan Natarajan and Sumant Sood

What Goes Into Building a CEO Factory?
Story by Stephen Remedios

Empowering Intrapreneurs within the Federal Government at NASA
Story by Kevin Rosenquist

Integrity, Rationality and Collegiality: Ingredients for Greatness
Story by Marcus Ryu

Who Do People Report to Here?
Story by Richard Sheridan

Project 10X: Growing the DNA for 21st Century Leadership in Organizations
Hack by Max Shkud and Bill Veltrop

Quit Email and Start Leading
Hack by Kim Spinder

Please explore the finalist stories and hacks and add your comments and ratings — they’ll make a difference as finalists update and build on their entries for final judging. We’ll announce the winners of the Leaders Everywhere Challenge the week of August 19th.

Most companies put innovation at the top of their agendas. But how many devote the energy and resources it takes to build innovation into the values, processes, and practices that rule everyday activity and behavior? Not many, as we argued when we launched the Innovating Innovation Challenge in October.

That disconnect isn’t due to lack of human ingenuity or resources; it’s actually the result of organizational DNA. Productivity, predictability, and alignment are embedded in the marrow of our management systems. Experimentation, risk-taking, and variety are the enemy of the efficiency machine that is the modern corporation. Of course, it’s variety and the daring to be different that produces game-changing innovation.

So how do we make every management process a catalyst, rather than a wet blanket, for innovation? And, importantly, how do we make innovation a true core competence? While we didn’t expect to find many organizations that had woven innovation into every element of their management model, we did hope to discover individuals and teams making real progress on important pieces of the puzzle.

After a few months, 140 superb contributions, and 24 finalists, we’ve zeroed in on a set of winning entries that represent some of the world’s most daring and comprehensive approaches to making innovation an everyday, everywhere capability.

Today, we’re delighted to announce the 10 winners of the Innovating Innovation Challenge, the first leg of this year’s HBR/McKinsey M-Prize for Management Innovation.

In alphabetical order:

Managing for 21st Century Crime Prevention in Memphis
by Toney Armstrong, Memphis Police Department

An inspiring story of transformation from a traditional bureaucracy to a vibrant innovation culture in which the insights and observations of every individual from edge to edge not only matter, but produce immediate impact and make the organization continuously smarter.

Democratizing Entrepreneurship: Village Capital’s Peer Selection Model
by Ross Baird, Village Capital

An exciting and powerful model for cultivating, evaluating, funding, and growing new ideas — and a detailed recipe for unleashing the power of peer review in any organization.

Case Coelce — Inspiring Innovation for Traditional Work Environments
by Luiz De Gonzaga Coelho Junior, co-authored by Odailton Arruda, Coelce

An honest and human account (dead ends and all) of developing a continuous innovation capability in an electricity distributor in the poorest region in Brazil.

Fail Forward
by Ashley Good, Engineers Without Borders Canada

The “Failure Report” is a refreshing and bold practice that takes the tired mantra of “embracing failure” and turns it into a way of life for an organization — and a provocative invitation to all of its partners.

Sustainability as Innovation Strategy: How Sustainability and Innovation Drive Each Other and Company Competitiveness at Danone
by Monica Kruglianskas, Danone, co-authored by Marc Vilanova, ESADE Business School

This story unpacks Danone’s singular approach to embedding sustainability in its innovation agenda and innovation in its approach to sustainability. A case study in how to bring values to life, unleash the spirit of experimentation, and scale new ideas and practices.

Democratize Innovation — For Sustained Innovation Culture
by Lalgudi Ramanathan Natarajan, Titan Industries

A multiplex approach to layering in innovation capabilities from the shop floor up in India’s largest jewelry and watch retailer. The Titan story is a down-to-earth account of true social innovation — both in terms of the process and the result.

Whirlpool’s Innovation Journey: An On-Going Quest for a Rock-Solid and Inescapable Innovation Capability
by Moises Norena, Whirlpool, co-authored by JD Rapp

The state of the art when it comes to developing innovation as a core competence. Whirlpool changed its organizational DNA to embrace innovation at the deepest level and unpacks the journey in generous detail here.

Unleashing Inclusive Innovation at Cisco
by Kate O’Keeffe, co-authored by John Marsland, Carlos Pignataro and Lisa Voss, Cisco

A thorough and instructive account of working every lever and animating an entire organization — from the bottom up and the top down — to embrace innovation.

Project Bushfire — Focusing the Might of an Entire Organization on the Consumer & Customer
by Stephen Remedios, The Stephen Remedios Company, co-authored by Aswath Venkataraman, Sandeep Ramesh, Shruti Kashyap and Shashwat Sharma, Hindustan Unilever

A compelling, homegrown practice for jolting a vast organization into tight communion with the marketplace — and a recipe for seeing around corners, energizing every last person in the company, and closing the gaps between “sense” and “respond.”

Is Managed Innovation an Oxymoron?
by Kumar Sachidanandam, Cognizant

A comprehensive and illuminating story of how one organization tackled the über challenge of building innovation into its management model — with powerful insights on wrestling with the right big questions.

Congratulations to all of the winners and the organizations behind them! We’ll be unpacking many of these stories and others from the Innovating Innovation Challenge here in the weeks to come. In the meantime, stay tuned for the launch of the second leg of the HBR/McKinsey M-Prize here in early March.

As human beings, we are born with a creative impulse, with an innate desire to use our imagination to better the world around us. Yet, all too often, our organizations end up being less innovative than the people within them. The dozens of in-the-trenches innovators who responded to our Innovating Innovation Challenge embody the first assertion and are working relentlessly and fearlessly to overturn the second.

We asked for real-world case studies and bold new ideas that will help us make innovation a deep-rooted, systematic competence in every kind of organization. In other words, how do we make innovation more of a natural act and less of a happy accident?

Of course, that’s easier said than done. The disciplines of management were invented, more than a hundred years ago, to drive variety out of organizations. The goal was to excise the irregularities, in an effort to ensure conformance to work rules, quality standards, timetables and budgets. Today, though, it’s the irregular people with their irregular ideas and irregular methods who create the irregular successes and profits. All too often, the quest to routinize the irregular ends up squelching innovation. The goal? Organizations that are paragons of penny-pinching efficiency and bastions of rule-busting innovation.

We received more than 140 entries from a diverse group of thinkers, practitioners and experimenters from around the world in pursuit of that goal. The judges and the MIX editorial team pored over the stories and hacks looking for depth, boldness, originality, clarity, and the ability to inspire and instruct in equal measure. We found those qualities in abundance — and are delighted, along with our partners at Harvard Business Review and McKinsey & Company, to announce 24 finalists (in alphabetical order):

Don’t Use Your New Innovation Project to Change Your Business Model — Build On What You Do Well and Ensure Your Success
Hack by Jean Angus, Saint-Gobain

Managing for 21st Century Crime Prevention in Memphis
Story by Toney Armstrong, Memphis Police Department

Democratizing Entrepreneurship: Village Capital’s Peer Selection Model
Story by Ross Baird, Village Capital

iMentors — Innovation belts spreading innovation within the organization
Story by João Manuel Brito Martins, co-authored by Jose Alberto de Oliveira Pereira, EDP Brazil

Keeping the Start-Up Spirit Alive at Red Gate
Story by Alice Chapman, Red Gate Software

Shell GameChanger — A Safe Place to Get Crazy Ideas Started
Story by Russ Conser, co-authored by Hans Haringa, Henk Mooiweer and Wim Schinkel, Shell

Case Coelce — Inspiring Innovation for Traditional Work Environments
Story by Luiz De Gonzaga Coelho Junior, co-authored by Odailton Arruda, Coelce

Fail Forward
Story by Ashley Good, Engineers Without Borders Canada

Making Innovation part of the DNA
Story by Jens Hauglum, co-Authored by Bente Mari Kristiansen, Bjørn Henrik Vangstein and Eyvind A. Larre, FINN.no

Blank Checks: Unleashing the Potential of People and Businesses
Hack by Sanjay Khosla, Mondelez, co-authored by Mohanbir Sawhney, Kellogg School of Management

Sustainability as Innovation Strategy: How Sustainability and Innovation Drive Each Other and Company Competitiveness at Danone
Story by Monica Kruglianskas, Danone, co-authored by Marc Vilanova, ESADE Business School

Innovation as a Business: How to Create a Repeatable and Sustainable Innovation Engine
Story by Lawrence Lee, PARC

Transforming Corporate Culture through Pervasive Innovation at KT
Story by Misook Lim, Korea Telecom

Democratise Innovation — for sustained Innovation culture
Story by Lalgudi Ramanathan Natarajan, Titan Industries

Whirlpool’s Innovation Journey: An on-going quest for a rock-solid and inescapable innovation capability
Story by Moises Norena, Whirlpool

Unleashing Inclusive Innovation at Cisco
Story by Kate O’Keeffe, co-authored by John Marsland, Carlos Pignataro and Lisa Voss, Cisco

Global solutions, local failure — Overcoming barriers in implementing open innovation
Hack by Frank Piller, co-authored by Patrick Pollok, David Antons and Dirk Lüttgens, RWTH Aachen University

Project Bushfire — Focussing the might of an entire Organization on the Consumer & Customer
Story by Stephen Remedios, The Stephen Remedios Company, co-authored by Aswath Venkataraman, Sandeep Ramesh, Shruti Kashyap and Shashwat Sharma, Hindustan Unilever

21st Century Play Dates: How USC Annenberg’s Innovation Lab brings together diverse communities to provoke innovation
Story by Susan Resnick West, co-authored by Erin Reilly and Jake de Grazia, USC Annenberg School

Innovation is not coincidence; it is built systematically every day and everyone can take part in it
Story by Óscar F. Rodríguez, Banco Davivienda

Is managed innovation an oxymoron?
Story by Kumar Sachidanandam, Cognizant

Crafting one of the world’s largest ideapreneurship — seeding a grassroots revolution in service innovation
Story by Pranay Shah Singh, co-authored by Puneet Ramaul and Annu Talwar, HCL Technologies

“Ever Forward” Extreme Makeover — DPR Construction Rebuilds their Continuous Improvement Process from the Foundation Up
Story by Dan Tran, DPR Construction

Innotribe — a tribe of innovators in the financial industry
Story by Peter Vander Auwera, SWIFT

Please check out the finalist stories and hacks and add your comments and ratings ̬ they’ll make a difference as finalists update and build on their entries for final judging. We’ll announce the winners of the challenge here the week of February 11th.