Barriers to innovation and how to overcome them

According to a McKinsey published a report, 80% of business executives believe that their current businesses models are at risk. A further 84% think that innovation is a crucial factor in their growth strategy, and only 6% are satisfied with their innovation performance.

This shows that most organizations know that innovation is necessary for survival and it is the future. Yet very few organizations have a satisfactory working innovation strategy, why is that the case and what are the main barriers to innovation?

From our experience, we found 3 main barriers that are responsible for obstructing innovation efforts in organizations. We will go over them and suggest possible ways to overcome those barriers. Below are the barriers in order of importance and impact.

1. Corporate Culture

This is by far the biggest barrier there is when it comes to innovation, nothing else will matter if the corporate culture is not properly addressed. Corporate culture is seldom supportive of innovation simply because failure of any kind is stigmatized. This can be either through verbal criticism or it can even be through reflections on employees’ year-end review. This kind of environment actively discourages experimentation and growth of new ideas which are critical to innovation.

Solution:

Celebrate learnings: a big part of innovation is testing assumptions in ideas and learning, whatever the feedback of the test, whether it confirmed the assumption or invalidated it, that should be celebrated as learning that can be built upon moving forward and as one less unknown. Embracing a “test and learn” culture allowing the team to move forward more confidently when designing and building innovative products or services.

Exposure to Open innovation: Getting employees exposed to startups can help them get an outside perspective and seeing different ways of innovating. This can inspire employees to be more willing to try new things and slowly change the culture within.

Incentive structure: Having incentives that encourage innovation can be a good way to change culture whether that is offering cash prizes for innovation projects like GE or bonuses like Google or possibly equity in the product if it takes off. These all can help get your employees excited about pursuing innovation projects and ultimately change the culture in the organization.

2. Internal processes

Let’s imagine that culture is not a challenge for a minute, the next barrier is long complicated bureaucratic processes, where it takes an average of 3 people to approve any action. However, as mentioned in the previous post innovation processes are all about speed, so having layers upon layers of bureaucratic procedures essentially suffocates all innovation efforts.

Solution:

The Innovation Corridor: Creating a fast lane for innovation projects, this can be done by making sure that everyone on the chain of command is on the same page about the goals of innovation in your organization. This way processes can be streamlined for maximum efficiency with dedicated resources, funding and support staff depending on the scope of the projects.

Decision Matrix: There should be a clear and straight forward way to assess whether projects get a “go or no-go” decision based on data and not the highest paid person opinion.

3. Standardized tools & training

If culture is good and processes are set, then the only barrier left is training and tools. Just like any other job, you need to be trained to know what to do and how to do it and thereafter given access to the right tools. When this is lacking employees can get frustrated trying to run experiments with no standard tools or approach.

They may end up wasting a lot of time trying to come up with new ways to perform simple innovation tasks on each new project, that could cause the projects to seem disjointed and harder to extract learnings from. This also ends up making continuity difficult to achieve, as no one else aside from the original team would be able to carry over or build on previous innovation projects.

Solution:

Innovation training and having a platform that employees have access to whenever they want to start an innovation project. Making sure that the tools are standardized for all and are in line with your organization’s innovation processes. This way all the tests and learnings follow a similar format, making it easy to keep record and build on them.

TAKEAWAY:

Most organizations understand that innovation is critical to their growth strategy but they still struggle to implement any successful innovation strategies. The reason for this struggle can be traced to 3 main barriers, culture, internal processes and standardized tools & training. Below are the suggested solutions to each barrier.

• Culture: adopting a test and learn culture as opposed to failure and disgrace culture.
• Internal processes: creating an Innovation corridor to go around complicated bureaucratic processes.
• Standardized tools and Training: Training and access to standardized tools in line with the organizations innovation process.