Three Imaginary Barriers to Innovation?

I’ve been talking to a lot of people about innovation lately.  More often than not they have three immediate reactions – each of them seen as barriers to change and each of them wrong to a large extent.

First, people immediately translate the word innovation to mean new products. While innovation is definitely critical to new product development, innovation is equally important if you are offering services to your users.  And, perhaps even more important, innovation is absolutely essential to the development of new and improved systems to operate your company, organization, non-profit, etc. 

The same skills, tools and disciplines have been proven to be highly effective for the development of innovative products, services and systems, but too often services and systems have been forgotten about.

Second, people immediately translate innovation to mean idea generation sessions.  Ideation. For a few decades now companies have been paying gurus to come in, run an ideation session and fly away.  Too often the work product is a couple of thousand sticky notes with bits and pieces of “ideas.”  A surge of creativity followed by the stark realities of day jobs.

But to be true innovation, an idea needs to be developed, tested and then delivered -- creating value in the marketplace.  Unless your work product is an executed program that gets to your end user, all you have is a bunch of sticky notes and there isn’t much return with sticky notes.

Third, people believe that innovation is an add-on to their already overwhelming lives.  So many have the image of 3M employees getting 10-15% of their workday to devote to new ideas but, in this day and age when companies have gone from fat and happy to lean and mean to strapped and strained, nobody believes that their people can take on a whole new innovation process over and above their current work load.

Innovation shouldn’t be thought of as a net extra new product process, but rather a new approach to bringing innovative thinking to everything you do – your current work, your core improvements as well as those dramatic new offerings and systems that will truly change your business.  Getting innovative at your current job will not only improve the business near term it will most likely free up the time to generate and deliver the big ideas that will make a real difference for you. 

Do these concerns sound familiar? Let me know what you think and let’s talk about a solution.