In all of the examples given above, innovation was baked into an organization’s culture because that organization had taken steps to address the six big hurdles faced by innovation creators.

But, in each one of these examples, the organizations took an extra critical step towards guaranteeing that innovation would actually happen. After addressing the innovation creator’s 6 big hurdles, they also went one better by creating a structured platform to support that innovation.

• Army’s OPFOR used their highly structured way of communicating military strategy called the “operational orders”, combined with specifically delegating the responsibility of achieving tactical goals down commanders in the field.
• Consulting firms use a network of partners.
• Derivatives community uses academic journals and industry associations.
• Open-source software has the structure of SourceForge and related web sites
• Wikipedia has an open taxonomy and a policy of letting anyone edit any article. However, Wikipedia does provide a structured platform. The structure comes in the form of the Wiki’s format. Specifically, Wikipedia forces contributors to write the entries in a very specific way, with titles, short descriptions, tables of content, links, etc. Wikipedia has set up further structure to help facilitate the creation of new articles. The tightly defined process begins with someone creating a “stub” for an entry. Wikipedia readers use the stubs to show each other where new articles could be added in the encyclopedia.

Thus, if you want to make an environment where innovation creators thrive, you must design a structured platform to support that innovation.