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Business Week has an interesting piece on companies looking to innovate outside their HQ. This is based on the belief that corporate HQ serves to stifle innovation, rather than inspire it. The article mentions a number of examples including Motorola, who developed the Razr in a lab in downtown Chicago, instead of the corporate campus.

When Gen Xers arrived on the corporate scene in the mid 1990s, there was a trend for companies to set up side "skunk works" organizations designed to motivate and inspire these new corporate mavericks. Coca-Cola did it with OK Soda, the tobacco companies did it and so did the brewers, none of these lasted very long and the key players ended up either being shut down or were subsumed by the master organization. The "poster child" was Saturn, who proudly claimed it was "a different kind of company", something that GM never really wanted or allowed it to be.

Last week saw the demise of Delta''s Song, a company that always looked like it was being out-thought and out smarted by Jet Blue, the competitor it was trying so hard to emulate. That is probably where the problem started, it was all about the brief. Song wanted to be like Jet Blue, but a little different. They did a pop-up store, got Kate Spade to design the uniforms and tried hard to appeal to the female traveler. In the end, it was just not distinctive enough and had no real point of difference.

Unless you are 100% committed to setting up a truly independent unit with its own power base, vision and mission, all efforts are likely to fail. At Motorola, new hires Ed Zander CEO and Geoffry Frost CMO understood they needed to make radical changes to turn the company around. Setting up a studio in downtown Chicago and filling it with young designers reaped its rewards, to-date, the Razr has sold 12.5 million units.

Look for others to copy Motorola's "Innovation Mosh Pit" and don't be surprised when many of them fail.

One interesting the idea is the one proposed by Artesia, to establish temporary 3-month InnoLabs, where companies can rapdidly develop ideas over a specific time period, this was discussed at the LIFT 06 conference.