Emergent innovation is a new paradigm which seeks out, recognizes, and helps promote useful innovation methodologies already at work in the organization. To promote emergent innovation, leadership must utilize trusted intermediaries to seek and uncover existing invisible corporate innovators, share successful innovation methodologies with other employees, and clear away the corporate impediments that initially drove the innovator underground. Emergent innovation seeks to uncover and extend small wins, and finite, complete, implemented innovations, which may ultimately attract internal allies, deter opponents, and motivate further innovation in the organization.

For many companies, the current global economic downturn has revealed that protracted, successful innovation is critical to corporate competitiveness. As Stanford University Graduate School of Business Professor, Anthony Davila noted, "Superior innovation provides a company the opportunities to grow faster, better, and smarter than their competitors – and ultimately to influence the direction of their industry… In the long run, the only reliable security for any company is the ability to innovate better and longer than the competitors." Because the limits of internal efficiency already may have been reached, companies realize that getting `better' is important, but getting `different' may be a matter of corporate life and death. According to General Electric CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, "The only long-term source of profit, and the only reason to invest in a company, is your confidence in its ability to innovate."

Corporate leadership may have unintentionally overlooked a powerful source of fresh, innovative ideas. Historically, most modern innovation programs find willing and technically capable employees and then attempt to impose new and oftentimes foreign changes in organizational structures, values, policies, and procedures. Executives should consider emergent innovation, a new and intentionally low-risk innovation paradigm. Emergent innovation assumes that, regardless of how small or seemingly insignificant, the heartbeat of innovation is already alive and at work somewhere in the organization. Emergent innovation is `emergent' because of an intentional process to seek out, recognize, and promote `underground' innovation methodologies already successfully at work in the organization. In contrast to massive corporate change expected from traditional innovation techniques, emergent innovation seeks to uncover and extend iterative `small wins' that may develop momentum, begetting more innovation success for the company. Progress is often quick, results are usually sustainable, and emergent innovation may be broadly applied across the corporation. Corporate leadership must play a substantive role in recognizing and promoting corporate-wide utilization of methodologies already familiar to `underground innovators' and, at the same time, make the internal environment more amenable to their efforts.

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