Innovator’s Dilemmas: quality vs. innovation?
This link will take you to MSN video where you can watch a 6 minute discussion hosted by WSJ which involves Judith L. Estrin, Packet Design CEO, Douglas Merrill, Google’s CIO, and Martin De Beer, Cisco’s SVP for Emerging Technologies.
Judith states that quality processes can be the enemies of innovation. Relying on strict benchmarks, tight metrics and uniformity might help with supporting incremental innovation, but would not favor a diversified enough environment for breakthrough innovation to flourish. She also talks about companies becoming victims of their own a success when well established projects end up taking up all of the oxygen, thus leaving no room to work on new ideas. 
Some of these projects become more and more complex with each product release, as they evolve by absorbing new market and customer requirements.
Douglas claims that great ideas come from anywhere in their organization. Google is consciously avoiding any internal regulatory and corporate policy burdens which would impact the wisdom of crowds, referring to the need to tap into widespread talent available in the company.
Martin agreed with the fact that innovative thinking needs to be pervasive across all organizations for a company to thrive, however he believes that it makes sense to set different processes and budgets for specific teams to be able focus on innovative projects leading to emerging technologies and risk taking behaviors.
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