I frequently hear amazing stories of innovation in the technology business. There are many remarkable stories in other fields such as medicine, energy, agriculture, and countless others. In most organizations, continuously seeking out game changing innovations is identified an important goal. Hopefully, the environment that you are in lends itself to the type of creativity that is necessary to drive innovative ideas. When you have ideas percolate up, one of the questions that needs to be applied is that of scalability. That is, can the innovative product, service or process scale up and be replicated on a wide spread basis.
For example, perhaps an individual on your team suggests a process change that could reduce customer wait times by 30%. You get excited because this could be a powerful improvement to your service. Perhaps, however, the suggestion is dependent upon a skill, talent or other capability that is only evident in a small percentage of the people who would be in charge of executing it. Repeatability is required to achieve scale in any innovation and it is important to consider this factor with any new idea.