Here is what executives say when asked why their firms cannot innovate:
1. Risky
2. No Method
3. Fear of Failure
4. All the good ideas are gone
5. Unpredictable
6. Company Culture
7. Lack of Time
8. Lack of Resources
9. Fear of Change
10. Competing Priorities
A systematic, routine way to innovate can break through these challenges. For example, a method such as S.I.T. (see www.sitsite.com) gives employees a way to innovate in real time. This eliminates the first five reasons on the list. With a routine and successful way to innovate, innovation is no longer risky, people are no longer afraid of failure, and innovation becomes predictable. When properly applied, an innovation method will create many new ideas for products and services even though people assume all the good ones are gone.
What about the last five reasons? From my experience, once a company experiments with an innovation method and sees how successful it can be, it is more willing to deal with the organizational aspects that hold innovation back. Companies need to create a culture that provides both the time and resources to innovate. A change in the culture can help overcome the fear of change. Putting priorities in order is easier once companies know they can innovate on command.
Seeing is believing. Put innovation in practice.
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i think one of the reasons that innovation is hard is probably because people have wrong and exxagerated expectations of what innovation is about. they therefore expect:
1) that innovations will have dramatic results
2) that some external objective sign will appear to verify that an idea is indeed innovative
3) that once an innovative idea appears, it will certainly be implemented since it will be so obviously be the right thing to do.
Since all three assumptions are mostly false, people are very often not willing to do what it takes to have real innovation, they often miss real innovation as it is sprouting and therefore do not supply the necesary conditions for it to grow, and finally they often do not recognize innovation when it is there asking them for a budge, and thus they allow it to disappear.