Fifteen ‘Tough Frost Questions’ On Innovation

This Scanlon tip is taken from a Mandate Development Seminar for Chief Executives conducted by Dr. Carl Frost in 1976.

Dr. Frost, a pioneer in the theory and practice of participatory management and founder of the Scanlon Leadership Network, is famous for the tough questions he asks. A Professor Emeritus at Michigan State University, Dr. Frost is an expert in the field of Organizational Development and is known for his research and consulting with organizations nationwide. Dr. Frost also created the Frost/Scanlon Principles and the Scanlon Roadmap for organizational change.

If you would like even more tough Frost questions designed to help you assess your company, the entire seminar handout is now available as a PDF at www.scanlonleader.org in the Educational Resources section. If you can answer the following questions, you and your company are well on your way to understanding and implementing radical innovation:

1. Do we manage the need, assurance and cost of innovation?

2. Should our organization be committed to innovation? Why? If so, in what areas do we need to innovate?

3. For which innovative directions do markets already exist? What markets can be developed?

4. Can we innovate in areas other than product line? (e.g., new approaches to marketing, financial resources, productivity or use of human resources)

5. What is our schedule for abandoning obsolete or marginal products?

6. Are we oriented toward providing more and better versions of our products, to developing new and different products and services or to both?

7. What are the costs and risks of innovating, both in financial and human resources? Can we afford to innovate, given current production costs and the high failure rate of product innovations? Can we afford not to innovate – in other words, can we survive internal stagnation and increased market vulnerability?

8. How can we reward employees for innovation while keeping development costs low?

9. Who pays for innovative efforts? Are the extra costs absorbed, or are some products abandoned to release resources for innovation?

10. Is innovation an organizational policy?

11. How is the need for innovation incorporated into the organizational structure?

12. What review procedures exist to identify and evaluate development efforts at the various critical stages?

13. Who decides when and how to innovate? Who implements this decision?

14. Is responsibility for innovation owned by all members of the organization?

15. What procedures are used to assess developmental failure? What have we learned from our failures about our skill and knowledge needs? Are failures carefully analyzed for possible spin-off products and processes?