Three main obstructions for innovation
Organisations spend a lot of time and energy talking about innovation. Often they focus all of their energy on developing strategies and action plans for innovation or developing new ways to beat the competition.
Rarely are the discussions at the top level in organisations about the obvious obstructions to innovation. In the following, I will identify the three biggest and most frequent obstructions and give advice on how to overcome them.
1. Limiting assumptions
“Nobody knows our customers better than our account managers.”
“No analysis can give us more knowledge about our market that we already have.”
Innovation begins with asking questions. Often we forget to ask questions because we are experts within our area and have built up a clear picture of the situation we are in. Our questions are often driven by our assumptions – they keep us from asking the right questions.
The first steps towards a realistic picture of the market is to build your research upon objective, concrete knowledge about the market.
2. Old-fashioned structures
“Innovation is something they work with in the marketing department.”
“It is the responsibility of Sales and Marketing department to know about client needs – my focus as a product developer is to develop products.”
Due to rising complexity in the value chain, many industries have lost the ability to work cross-functionally and to see new possibilities within the planned strategies. The motivation to try out new things and to get out of the comfort zone where you might fail is being ruined by result-orientated bonus systems and pre-defined goals.
I believe that a focus on cross-functional idea development in organisations and positive attention around the employees who dare to ask challenging questions will improve the ability to innovate and motivate innovative thinking in organisations.
3. A narrow definition of innovation
“We increase our focus on innovation by increasing the budgets of R&D.”
Reducing innovation to being only innovation in product development means missing out on many other important innovation possibilities in the value chain. Innovation can be made within areas like HR, suppliers, partners, logistics, communication, etc. By establishing innovation as a positive value in the entire organisation, you will strengthen the company’s future ability to innovate at many levels.
