Students' zone - A selection of Box Cases

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Box case 9.3

Fiat Iveco – identifying innovation challenges

Iveco is the arm of Fiat responsible for manufacturing and marketing
commercial and industrial vehicles, buses and diesel engines. Massimo
Fumarola has worked as Platform Development Manager in the heavy vehicles
division and as Business Development Manager in the Engine Business
Unit. In both roles he has been closely involved with considering how Iveco
can increase overall innovation performance. He says, ‘in my opinion there
are three challenges in managing innovation. The most important one has to
do with the organization and here there is a dilemma. On the one hand we
want employees to work in structured, methodical ways to produce products
in a timely, in fact a very disciplined way. On the other hand, we want people
to challenge the established ways of thinking and working. This is a big problem
and the only way to solve it is sometimes to take suitable people and
break them out from the parent organization and give them freedom not just
to act but also to think innovation.’

‘Getting enough people with the right experience is something we need to
work on. We have great functional specialists but not enough people that
have worked in several functions and have a deep understanding of the interfaces
[between functions]. Unfortunately, in this industry and other ones I
talk to, not enough people want to become what I’ll call “cross-functional
boundary managers”. It takes time to find, encourage and develop such
people’ says Fumarola.

‘Thirdly, it’s about getting everyone involved. It’s not just the voice of the
customer. You also need to involve the truck operators, the suppliers, the
regulatory agencies, and all the other stakeholders right from the beginning.
Interfaces, not functions, generate most of the problems and we’re getting
more interfaces to consider. I think that the best managers of tomorrow will
be the ones that can maximize innovation performance by minimizing the
interface issues’.