Do you want to innovate digitally? Rethink governance

When the company BASF launched the Onono laboratory in São Paulo, its mission was to accelerate innovation through rapid collaboration with local partners and startups. But its director, Antonio Lacerda, found himself facing an obstacle arising from corporate governance: he was informed that his laboratory would have to follow the same corporate security standards applied to BASF's cloud infrastructure for data from these partnerships, which it would make fast and agile partnerships with startups impossible.

Lacerda delayed the launch until he secured, with a significant investment of political capital, an exception: a separate “box” of data for his team, with special permission to share that data via APIs with new partners. Lacerda's experience, and that of so many sponsors of innovation, points to a fundamental Sweden Email List problem for digital transformation: in large companies, innovation teams are forced to fight for adaptations to rules that contradict their own function of change. But innovation will not happen at scale as long as it depends on ad hoc exceptions approved at the top of the organization.

Once started, projects move slowly, managed by teams that stay in traditional blocks. Resource allocation is also slow, as projects, although promising, sometimes wait weeks or months for the next round of approvals. Since each project is supported by an influential executive, no one wants to close it, even if it indicates little return. Meanwhile, risk aversion leads companies to finance only low-cost possibilities incremental improvements to what they already do that bring a guaranteed and quick ROI. This path will never lead to transformation.