Innovation: Ideas or Employees Needed Most?

(Cross-posted at my edublog as well.)

Over at Harvard Business Publishing's the Daily Stat (follow@TheDailyStat) I couldn't help but take exception to their post of 1/15:

Lack of a Big Idea Stands in the Way of Innovation

Only 47% of senior executives see their companies as more innovative than the competition, and 17% concede that they're even less innovative than peers, according to an Ernst & Young survey of C-suite executives at firms with revenues of $50 million to $5 billion. Among the most frequently cited innovation challenges are lack of appropriate personnel (48%) and "lack of a big idea" (41%).

While the data suggests that People vs Ideas is a close(-ish) call, the headline places emphasis on the Idea.  My viewpoint comes from HBR's own awesome article How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity by Ed Catmull summarizing the creative juggernaut's management philosophy and practice.  Catmull rests the weight of performance squarely on people and not ideas, and the results by the little-start-up-that-could-turned-Disney-lifeline are hard to argue with.

My own limited experience in comics publishing taught me the superior function of execution over ideas, and my faith that good people can really spin gold from straw.  The inverse is also true, which only furthers my belief that execution is where it's at.

~benc