Myelin Repair Foundation's Institutional Innovation

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Companies need to seek out customers with the kind of insight and passion that Johnson brings—and find ways to engage with them in much more fundamental ways than conventional market research or customer forums permit. Customers represent an important edge that will drive business innovation in the future. Companies should also remember they are customers themselves and find ways to promote institutional innovation among suppliers and other business partners.

3. Boundaries between domains of knowledge represent significant edges for innovation. Knowledge silos help to deepen knowledge, but they can become significant barriers to insight when experts find it difficult to connect across them. The MRF has paid a lot of attention to building shared understanding and respect across very diverse domains of research. By bringing together experts from such different areas, it's possible to generate insights that simply would not have arisen from individual domains.

4. Innovation is not just about idea generation. Too often, discussions of innovation tend to focus on ways to generate more creative ideas. In our experience, the core innovation challenge in the business world is rarely about generating more ideas. Sift through any business organization and there is an abundance of ideas. The real challenge is to mobilize a critical mass of resources behind promising ideas and to create the mechanisms to more rapidly test and refine ideas as they move from concept to delivery. This is one of the core insights of MRF's institutional innovation—it focuses on accelerating the idea-testing process and creating the necessary incentives to rapidly scale the most promising ideas into commercially successful products.

5. Distributed innovation does not necessarily mean loss of intellectual-property protection. A key institutional innovation of the MRF was to develop a way for participants to file for patent protection more rapidly while still sharing their discoveries traditionally via publication in peer-reviewed journals. Without adequate patent protection, the intellectual property generated from MRF's research would have little appeal to biopharmaceutical companies that will have to invest significant amounts of their own money to commercialize products. At one level, the MRF has created an open-source platform engaging peers from diverse institutions while finding a robust way to protect intellectual property.

John Hagel and John Seely Brown are co-chairman and independent co-chairman, respectively, of Deloitte LLP's Center for Edge Innovation. John Hagel writes a blog at Edge Perspectives. Their monthly column, Innovation on the Edge, explores what executives can learn from innovation emerging on various forms of edges, including the edges of institutions, markets, geographies and generations. Sign up here for an RSS feed.