MIT Sloan Management Review

innovation tools for their company. Innovators need to work with their IT departments to identify or develop the tools that they need to do their jobs.

Meanwhile, to address concerns about intellectual property, corporate leaders responsible for the procurement, development and maintenance of tools (innovation managers or corporate IT) need to offer guidance to innovators. They must provide clarity about steps that need to be taken and processes to put in place to prevent data loss or intrusion.

For each type of tool, products from many vendors exist, and they may differ from one another subtly, yet in ways that are significant for those who obtain the most value from them. (See “IT Tools to Support and Manage Innovation,” p. 44.)

III. Control One of the most important roadblocks to innovation occurs when R&D staff lack adequate control — of the computing resources and tools they require — owing, for example, to rigid standardization policies. An absence of innovation-facilitating IT governance practices is often at the root of the problem.

We observed many different models of control. Some organizations put significant IT resources directly in the hands of the R&D department; others provide for shared control of resources with the IT department; and still others assign control to a third party. The specific mode of control is not as important as its capability to facilitate routines and policies for addressing innovators’ requirements.

IT departments have good reasons for wanting to control hardware and software. The standards they set can smooth the flow of intraorganizational data, reduce hardware and software redundancy and lower costs. But innovators sometimes wish to acquire nonstandard or “one-off” tools for specialized tasks, even as they would ideally like such tools to be supported by the IT department. Neither may be possible if these tools are not compatible with existing standards.

Our study showed, however, that letting standardization be the driving IT philosophy is not effective when it comes to innovation tools. Asking innovators to create a “business plan” to explain

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