Innovation and Attrition

They say men are known by the company they keep. I believe a company is also known by the men it keeps.

Who invented the iPhone? Most people might just say Apple, while we understand it must have been someone within Apple. A company is a set of people. Most of the intellectual property owned by a company comes from its people. This bit is clear.

If the link of innovation to attrition is unclear, let's just first establish IP = people, and then the link of people to attrition. For all companies in the world, attrition is a reality of varying proportions. Again for all companies, innovation and creation of intellectual capital is a clear part of purpose, and a strong lever of competitive advantage and sustainability. This IP, despite all the talk of DR/BCP, effectively resides in the minds of a company's employees, we know that. When we lose people, we lose IP.

I daresay it is impossible for a company to have a innovation strategy without having a strategy to retain key people responsible for innovation and other guardians of such IP. We all understand it is not very difficult to replicate innovations people see in one company in the next company they join. It is in more cases than some, easy to tweak designs to escape patent litigation. A lot of IP, especially around business innovation, as against technology, is implicit and never patented. A lot of other IP is not patented since patenting is a time-consuming process and requires you to declare and define the innovation, which is seen as making it easier for competition to access, copy and tweak the same.

Next level - it may not be real attrition, but maybe even pre-attrition loss of engagement that might prevent people from opening up their ideas for the good of the organization (or, let’s say, to further their own growth in the organization for the more self-centered ones) instead of saving up their ideas for the day they either start something on their own, or another environment that makes them feel it’s for the longer term there. Or simply provides for more respect for their ideas.

We hire people who bring knowledge with them. We value employees for their prior experience at respected organizations. We expect them to deliver results leveraging their knowledge and experience. The competition expects exactly this from our employees.

It’s high time we take a hard cross-functional look - are we really investing on ideas for our own company’s future or are we in danger of becoming a breeding ground for talent and ideas for our competition to benefit from?