Innovation Lankton manages innovation at Nypro by creating a highly-competitive environment. There are a few different ways in which this environment is fostered. The company has performance bonuses only for top performers, creating incentive among good performers to improve their performance.

Lankton also has implemented a corporate culture that emphasizes both competition and intrapreneurship. The latter is important because Lankton recognized that top innovators typically prefer to become entrepreneurs, so the company developed mechanisms that would keep them in the company, by providing them with similar opportunities within Nypro. The culture derives from Lankton's own personality. Competitive by nature, he has repeatedly pushed competition as a key message -- for example at a corporate retreat where competition was emphasized over cooperation.

The company also fosters competition between its different plants. Each plant is roughly the...

When one plant innovates, the other plants are expected to adopt the innovation and make further improvements. The cultural element of this is that for any given plant, innovation receives more intrinsic reward than extrinsic -- there is considerable prestige attached to being the best. That they are spread across the world but still compete internally is congruent with some of the best practices suggested by Birkinshaw and Hood (2001) -- peninsulas not islands and create international networks.
The outlook towards customers also facilitates innovation at Nypro. The reason this works is that while the products are to an extent the same around the world, customer needs are not. If the plants were oriented to improving their operations, they would likely reach a point of diminishing returns with respect to investment in innovation. However, by focusing on…