I am on a personal mission to convince innovation software providers, corporations and innovators to change how they undertake innovation.
In some recent posts, I argued that we need to adopt a broader innovation ecosystem thinking and design. I stated in one recent post, “We must promote more dynamic environments and the constant desire that organizations and their people have to be fit for innovating purposes, adaptive and fluid in such highly challenging and confusing times.”
I do think we need to restate the current barriers to innovation.
These barriers do not ‘magically’ change by delivering what I believe moves us to a better system for innovation, that of an ecosystem and platform architecture. Still, barriers do need to be consciously built into any new thinking as ones “to be resolved” in any new solution design.
Recognizing the present and ongoing barriers to innovation needs solutions to be built into any future design. Let me outline many of these here, building further the case for necessary change.
Today most organizations have barriers towards creativity, ideas and innovation.
Many of these barriers to innovation lie in attitudes and perceptions at the leadership level but also can run through the organization’s design. The overriding tendency is to reduce risk and stifle the creativity that challenges the status quo or current design. In today’s world, nothing seemingly ‘stands still’, and organizations, business models and market approaches are in constant flux. They need a more fluid, highly adaptive design. Today we have far too much rigidity within our designs.
Those common workplace barriers of immovable forces confronting potential change agents, judgements made that often ridicule what is not often fully understood, the fixation of policies and procedures pushing away new creative processes or thinking and simply misunderstanding by many who don’t find they can be creative, and the different type of work innovating and the creative process require in hard, thoughtful and often uncertain work.
Innovation is one of those activities that constantly “swim against the currents of the dominating culture of the organization”. We cripple our creative process as it is often not visible or transparent; the innovative process can be seen as a “black box” by many in the organization; they only can judge the end result. We do need to recognize innovation carries more risk and uncertainty and should have a much “higher share of voice” in the organization for constant awareness, engagement and being informed.
Today innovation does not have a fully connected process, it has many highly developed parts of a process, but it lacks connectivity; this transparency is often not given the dynamic environment where ideas flow, concepts are exchanged, and people and specialists fail to connect and leverage each others expertise and knowledge fully.
Applying technology across a connected platform environment begins to change that.
I don’t want to get ahead of myself here. Any proposed solutions need to account for resolving current restrictions or barriers.
Firstly, I need to return to today’s barriers to be fully recognized and then begin to see these differences from a new perspective. A practical, innovative environment needs resolving these and a significant new set of barriers in any newly designed innovation ecosystem.
Here I provide six root cause-and-effect barriers that stifle innovation that need addressing.
- The pressure of pace and time. The need to respond to unexpected business attacks, changing competitive positions, and the inability to ramp up fast enough to take advantage of consumers’ rising expectations risks a real-time-to-market issue. Organizations are often too early or too late to market. The mechanism to manage time and pace in a highly dynamic, response way is often missing. Innovation is far too linear in its approach; it can be different.
- Alignment to Strategy and Corporate Goals. Innovation requires fresh competencies and skill sets; it lacks consistent upgrading, often not actively pursuing new or fresh knowledge and insights. Alignment to the organization’s mission is often not fully accounted for in concepts or ideas that link to those ambitions in initial screening and idea evaluations and pursuits. Often knowledge stays in silos, often unaware that the available knowledge has value or contribution. Competencies to execute are often lacking as those deciding strategies are so often not involved in the innovation process, so it often lacks resonance or sync poorly with stated needs or desires. The result is misalignment or unbalanced portfolios or funding misalignment.
- Enabling technology and processes. Innovation often sits outside the core processes and business structures; many intellectual property opportunities are missed by innovation being treated separately. Separating innovation discovery or exploration from the core leaves significant gaps in identification and relating to realities or actual business needs. The capturing of relevant knowledge can be random and ad hoc; it is not as systematic as it should be, with innovative software solutions not integrated, proven or tested as accepted organization methodologies and often continue to shut out the external collaboration process, as “new value creation” is risky in sharing and losing “exclusive” ownership or revenue. So innovation lacks an integrated innovation platform, often not part of the enterprise architectural fabric and not as systematic as it should be.
- Rapidly altered environments. Today’s and future market complexities need a different approach and design. In many ways, innovation software is still low-cost pervasive technology not yet as robustly built on the trend towards increasingly ubiquitous connected computing sensors, devices, and networks that monitor and respond to identified needs. Design is becoming more often unique, not as repeatable, and needs a growing unique set of solutions. Scale and complexity are constantly shifting; success has become more unpredictable, and dealing with the constantly changing dynamics of market power is giving greater volatility. Throwing in that amplified scrutiny required in good, robust business governance makes it even harder. This growing complexity increases the need to be “highly adaptive.” We need to recognize how ineffective the innovation process is, in its often isolation, robustness in definitions, and execution.
- A lack of real awareness of appropriate innovation tools and methodologies. A master craftsman needs access to all the best tools available to do the best possible job. Organizations often restrict innovation in accessing these tools or the latest methodology thinking, relying on a limited ‘universe’ of insights due to time and resources. The innovator has a limited premium of available time to investigate and research outside of their domain, quickly reading the latest posts but often not searching in a structured way. The ability and need to share, the effective leverage of networks and collaborators, and the necessary investments to experiment and explore are all currently constrained. How far has innovation management and its capacities come? How can open knowledge be shared more effectively?
- The shift in the need to invest in technology enablers. The ability to build into innovation processes the growing need for big data/ advanced analytics, virtual modelling/ simulation, virtual workplaces, augmented reality, collective intelligence, cognitive, and self-learning systems all are a work-in-progress in organizations, primarily placing the investment and understanding of these enablers within the operation and manufacturing environments. Why do we not have these technology enablers embodied in the innovation process? Innovation software providers are moving towards these but perhaps not in a holistically designed way.
Are organizations actively in pursuit of designing a more robust innovation management process?
End-to-end innovation needs to focus on three primary innovation needs. It requires a transparent intelligence process that requires a fully digitalized, connected process. It needs access to the best tools and techniques for foresight and interaction as equally critical and needed to build into any robust systems of the future. Are we allowing innovation that digital technology access, linked across an ecosystem and platform environment that it should have?
Organizations, in my view, woefully under-invest in innovation. Innovation should have the same high-level organisational focus as manufacturing, operations, the supply chain or the financial systems in infrastructure, connected systems, resources and investment and funding capital. Innovation is the future lifeblood, the work-to-be-done need of the organization, yet it remains ill-equipped to build the future value and growth organizations talk about. Why?
We have multiple roadblocks that need breaking down and resolving
Many of today’s innovation limitations are within the legacy systems we still have for innovation. We still have not enabled an integrated end-to-end comprehensive innovation ecosystem designed structure.
We create our barriers to innovation, there is a cause, and you do get the effect of limiting your results, value and potential by operating in sub-optimal innovation systems. We can change this, but it needs designing for intelligence, foresight and interaction to shape different outcomes.
Today, our innovation systems are inadequate and not fit for the job. Not addressing this innovation ecosystem design will continue to provide innovation disappointments and restricted top management engagement and deep involvement. Can we afford to let this continue?