Following up on the discussion started by Roger Smith in his post Can Innovation be Bought? -- it's an interesting angle to consider that senior management's lack of familiarity or confidence with external innovations may be a barrier to their implementation.
But is it possible that the managers citing this lack of confidence are putting a new face on the old "not invented here" mentality? Many companies using "closed" models for innovation have long used it as a defense to maintaining their internal staffs and large R&D budgets. P&G and others are showing the true power of open innovation models in the market today.
So what are the other potential barriers to innovation? Strategos, Gary Hamel's consulting firm, released a survey with senior executives in 2004 on the key barriers to effective innovation. Some interesting statistics in that study regarding the top factors cited as barriers...
Also interesting that only 15% cited "we don't know how to think out of the box" as a barrier to innovation.
Related Stories: | Topics:Innovation, innovation + creativity, Roger Smith, The Procter & Gamble Company, Gary Hamel, Business, Executive Management |
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Recent Comments | 1 Total
August 9, 2005 at 10:02pm by peter
First can any-one tell me if any one has ever made money thinking out of the box.
Strikes me that customer tend to be in the box which suggest to me that to make money you need to be outside thinking into the box.
Second, it seems to me that there is a bunch of dark space in any organisation which sits either side of the plan. On one side are mistakes and on the other side are things that aren't on the plan.
In my experience, thing that aren't on the plan that aren't mistakes are largely ignored. However, to this untrained eye - they often look like innovations or bear the kernel of innovation.
And even if you put innovation on the plan - these dark space innovations don't count becuse no one intendeded them. It's as if we let consciousness get in the way of a good idea.
Which brings me to internal and network fossicking - Should companies employ teams responsible for working over the dark space or could a company buy the right to work the dark space of another company.
Which leads me to conclude, if a sufficient number of managers employees etc are innovating without knowing it do they also need to consciously innovate given their limited success and skill.
I'm sure there would be a collective sigh of relief if they could just keep doing what they do ensuring success despite themselves.