Through my experience at Swisscom, I’ve worked to help our partners scale up their innovation initiatives. I’ve discovered that the following three factors can play a role in preventing this innovation from occurring:

The Skills

First, check if they have the right skills available within their company. Every new technology comes with different architecture, delivers a different type of performance and requires different tradeoffs. Look for skills that make the old practices obsolete. There are hundreds of books and articles about acquiring and developing the proper skills, but in summary, bring together skillful and curious people. Then, make them question the status quo, and learn with them.

The Wills

These are the factors that affect the will to change in the company. Some of them are part of the vaguely defined company culture. Start with the innovation teams. Do they really want to scale? The teams face an innovator’s dilemma:

• If the project is successful, they might get a small bonus, but their job will become more routine.

• If the project scales and fails, they risk their reputation and maybe their job.

This high-risk, small-reward deal makes people keep themselves busy with “innovating” for as long as possible, not willing to scale up or shut down. Some may even leave and start their own companies. To fix the dilemma, work with management to provide an attractive path for innovators to do their best work, and keep them with the company.