Increase your innovation

Fear of failing is one of the major inhibitors to innovation in any company. Often, new ideas are disregarded because of a failure to challenge the status quo. Management and leadership are resistant to new ideas because it takes away from the day-to-day tasks, which have a measurable return on investment. Furthermore, it’s success, not failure that is rewarded in most companies.

According to Laurence Lehman Ortega, affiliate professor in strategy and business policy at HEC Paris Executive Education: “As children we’re told that we need to succeed and are rewarded only when we do so. Managers in firms are only recognized and incentivized on their success and as a result are reluctant to take risks.”¹⁰

The silo effect – departments of companies working independently – is a major challenge to innovation. When specific business units work autonomously, it results in an overall breakdown of communication in the company, impacting alignment, focus and operations.

Innovation cannot be achieved unless there’s fluid communication in an organization.

There are not many employee job descriptions that highlight the daily task of being creative. Many companies aren’t willing to dedicate time for employees to focus on innovation, as it is a struggle to balance it with their existing workloads.

In a 2017 survey of 270 Chief Financial Officers (CFOs), the human resources firm Robert Half discovered that being bogged down by daily tasks was the major barrier to innovation (33%).¹¹

If the leadership of the company doesn’t carve out time in the daily grind for employees to focus on company innovation, the end result will be the status quo.

Bureaucratic, out-dated company policies are not just a productivity killer, but thwart innovation as well.

According to a 2017 study conducted by the Harvard Business Review, approximately two-thirds of business executives believe that bureaucracy is increasing in their respective organizations, while the average amount of time spent on bureaucratic tasks equates to 28% – more than one day – of the work week. Approximately 80% said that launching new ideas in their organizations is met with skepticism or resistance while two-thirds believe that bureaucracy thwarts the decision-making process.¹²

Innovation requires time as well as money.

And with many companies operating on razor-thin profit margins, many companies won’t dedicate the necessary budgets to developing new, creative ideas unless they provide a return on investment in the annual budget cycle.

There’s a natural lack of encouragement and resources to enable employees to spend dedicated time to think innovatively due to pressure of keeping the lights on.

Many blockers of innovation live in a company’s human resources department. Some HR people don’t have the right mindset for recruiting and nurturing employees who will be able to drive an innovation agenda.

Others fail to match talent with position and end up placing the wrong people in key jobs. Still others adopt a rigid culture or lack of leadership that ends up snuffing out innovation where it should be encouraged.

This ends up impeding the biggest catalyst a company has for driving innovation: Its employees. “People are the secret sauce in any innovative organization, from the smallest start-up to the largest corporation,” explains John Manley, CEO of the Business Council of Canada and former Deputy Prime Minister.

So how can a company ensure its HR department and other drags on innovation don’t snuff out innovative ideas?

It all starts with a company leadership’s commitment to fostering innovation.

Research by consulting management firm McKinsey, reveals that the biggest challenge to innovation that business executives face is making top talent available to work on innovation projects. An additional 40% don’t believe that they have the proper talent for the innovation projects they pursue.¹³

More than 70% of executives cite innovation as one of the top drivers of growth, yet most executives are “generally disappointed in their ability to stimulate innovation: some 65% of the senior executives surveyed were only somewhat, a little, or not at all confident about the decisions they make in this area.”

That major disconnect between business strategy and execution is attributed to the fact that creating a culture of innovation in a company is difficult.

“Even starting to build an organization in which innovation plays a central role is often far more frustrating than most executives ever imagine it to be,” the report states.

At the core of innovation, is understanding your customers and striving to solve their challenges. However, many companies view innovation as an “internal” exercise without any outside input.

This doesn’t mean that customers need to design an innovation strategy for you. Rather they should play a role by utilizing their outcome-based input in your own strategy.

“The process of innovation begins with identifying the outcomes customers want to achieve; it ends in the creation of items they will buy,” Anthony W. Ulwick of the Harvard Business Review. “When desired outcomes become the focus of customer research, innovation is no longer a matter of wish fulfillment or serendipity; it is instead a manageable, predictable discipline.”¹⁴