Incubation At Microsoft
“Incubation is one way to initially reduce coordination costs.”
“You say, “We’re going to do it off to the side.”
- “That gives the rest of the organization permission to ignore it, so that’s good. It manifests itself in many ways.”
- “Some people say, “Wow, what are those guys doing over there? It’s really cool.”
- “And some people get cynical and go, “Ah, those guys — there they go again, off doing their own thing.”
- “Later, as [the project] becomes more real, people can begin to factor it in and understand the right touch points. But that gives them the freedom to innovate and work without high degrees of coordination.”
- “What tends to be more difficult are centrally mandated [commands] — “Everyone shall depend on this new thing.” There are lots of coordination costs in that. “
“MSR [Microsoft Research] is an example of a big chunk of innovation that can happen without causing coordination costs in the rest of the company.”
“They innovate and then they have things like TechFest to make their innovations visible to other points in the company.”
“And then at the next release, those people will incorporate those changes.”
“Then we have another group that does applied research — Live Labs. They’re still researchers, but they’re trying to weave [their work] into products that have more applicability from the start.”
“Then, there are incubation groups within the business units. And those are very close to the product groups and the marketing groups within those organizations.”
Read Knwoledge@Wharton’s interview with Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie.
