One by one
There are many reasons why employees in large corporations do not innovate. One of the tasks of an Innovation Leader is to identify those barriers and come up with ways to break them down. Following are three groups of barriers I often encountered.
“I have no time/money to innovate”
- Having no time was usually an excuse, not a barrier: people who were passionate about their innovation did find the time. Regarding “no money”: in my 5 years as Innovation Leader, I have never seen a promising innovation, i.e. one that addresses an important business challenge, that failed because of lack of budget. On the contrary: I have seen several innovators not using the budget that was available to them. But sometimes these concerns pointed to a real barrier: not being sure how to take the next step. When innovators were not sure where to start, they often assumed that they had to do a full pilot and thus felt unsure about how to find time and resources.
- A solution: help innovators go through the front end of innovation (see also innovation framework): it usually takes an extremely limited amount of their time and a very limited budget to go through the Ideation and rapid Experimentation phases. If the innovation remains promising after those initial phases, then the Innovation Leader can secure extra time for the innovator with his/her management or find others in the corporation to do the Pilot phase.
“My manager asks me about the ROI (Return On Investment) of my idea” & “We have no good ideas”
- The ROI question was a real innovation killer. The “no good ideas” barrier came typically from managers that were focused on execution and efficiency, two traditional corporate succes factors. Both statements were a clear indication for the need for management education about innovation.
- A solution: Innovation Leaders can take those managers with their team through a workshop that explains the innovation framework. This workshop should cover Ideation (this exercise can also be done as an Innovation Challenge, which will likely demonstrate that there are many good ideas in the team). Then it should illustrate the next step with a quick Experimentation, including ways to learn fast and cheap. Then the workshop should let the team implement a full Pilot. Generate a discussion with the managers/teams on how to evaluate innovations in the different stages of the innovation framework.
“I’ll be blamed if it does not work” & “Compliance will never approve this”
- Fear of failure was a tough to overcome barrier for innovation, especially in a risk averse industry like healthcare. This barrier needed to be addressed from all sides: top down (management messaging, recognition), bottom up (applying the innovation framework) and from the side (the peers of the innovator).
- A solution: Innovation Leaders can mentor innovators on identifying key assumptions for their idea before launching a Pilot or engaging customers. To identify those key assumptions, innovators can be encouraged to engage with “potential antagonists”, like their manager or Compliance. Knowing the concerns from those “antagonists” will help the innovator to validate or disprove those concerns in early testing, it may help to get early buy-in from the antagonists and it will make the innovator feel more comfortable going forward with their innovation.
There are of course many more barriers and solutions than the ones I discussed here. As this can be overwhelming, it’s important for Innovation Leaders to identify the most critical ones and address those first. One by one.
As Benjamin Dana said:
“There has been opposition to every innovation in the history of man, with the possible exception of the sword.”
So, as Innovation Leader, I addressed the most critical barriers for innovation first. Then I moved on to the next one.
More about this topic: Top 30+ key obstacles to innovation, by Torben Rick and The Biggest Obstacles to Innovation in Large Companies, by Scott Kirsner
What is your opinion? Please share!
More of my blogs on innovation: Wim Vandenhouweele