Mining Underground Innovation

Many R&D employees proactively engage in innovation efforts not sanctioned by their managers. Organizations must find ways to surface these projects so that they can gain broader benefits.

Jeannie Phan/theispot.com

The research was conducted at Ford Motor Co., which funded the work and assisted with data collection.

It is hard to stop innovators from innovating — as we can see from the long history of skunkworks and unofficial side projects among R&D staff members.1 Consider Tetsuya Mizoguchi, an executive in Toshiba's mainframe computing division, who was convinced that there was an emerging demand for lightweight, portable PCs at a time when all such devices were large desktop machines. After management rejected the idea, he went underground to develop the first laptop computer — positioning Toshiba as a leader in the new category when it debuted in 1985.2 Laptops now outsell desktops by more than 4 to 1.

In our research at Ford Motor Co., we surveyed employees in R&D and found that from 2018 to 2021, 45% had developed projects without a manager's consent.3 Workers have a variety of reasons for doing this work out of sight. From earlier research, we know that underground innovators may want to defer discussion until they can present their best case or avoid the pressure that comes from managers demanding results.4 We learned that employees sometimes prefer a shortcut to solving problems encountered at work, don't want to spend time getting permission, or are simply driven by curiosity and determined to push past constraints — even if they aren't being paid for the work.

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Many R&D managers view underground projects as harmless and potentially beneficial and thus do not object to them as long as employees are meeting their formal responsibilities.

Jeroen P.J. de Jong is a professor at Utrecht University. Max Mulhuijzen is a researcher and doctoral candidate at Utrecht University. K. Venkatesh Prasad is senior vice president of research and chief innovation officer at the Center for Automotive Research in Michigan; this work was done while he was at Ford. The authors are grateful to Chafica Bounia, Markus Kees, and Rocio Luna (Ford), and Brita Schemmann (Hochschule Bremen) for contributing to the data collection.

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