Managing Innovation Generated Team Conflict

The American real estate industry has been tracking, examining, debating and denying a wide range of innovative disruptions and transitionary forces over the past several years. By way of example, transaction management has been on the industry menu for almost 20 years and is just now about to become mainstream. Agent ratings can be traced back six years and is only now preparing to take its place as an industry staple. The idea of developing and implementing superior consumer experiences is starting to gain traction after having competed with agent centricity for years. Integrating intensified agent portal participation promises to be challenging, given its inherent chain of command conflicts.

Perhaps most dramatic will be the management shifts and transitions that brokerages will have to integrate into their operations as a result of the new Upstream broker-centric data management program. These are but a few of the internal and/or external innovations that the industry is currently preparing to incorporate.

Each of these surviving innovations and developments (as well as a score of others working their way through the system) has followed a predictable course on its way to industry acceptance. Most started with a visioning experience gained through either industry publications or any one of several industry conferences that provide "coming out" events for new innovations.

At some point, these introductions blossom into discovery relationships as R&D, marketing and promotional activities and/or internal innovation programs seek out ideal candidates for beta testing, utilization and adoption phases. When the discovery programs find traction, the innovation journey moves to the design phase where specific needs and applications are addressed and resolved. It is during this phase that the future of the innovation is either sealed or rejected.