Overcoming the Four Big Barriers to Innovation Success

Innovative companies generate an annual TSR that is on average 3.6 % higher than those of their peers. Still, while 80% of innovation executives said innovation was a top-three priority at their companies, only 30% said their organizations were good at it.

In our experience, there are four, often interconnected, reasons that innovation programs fail to deliver real results.

TORQUE, NO TRACTION - Many organizations remain unclear about the innovation ambitions and each unit’s role in achieving those. People therefore work busily on new ideas, but they are not pulling in the same direction.

ABSTRACTION, NO ACTION - Other companies fail to link their strategies to customer-centric idea generation. There’s a lot of high-minded talk about innovation, but it never leaves the “ivory tower.”

STUCK IN THE LAB - Some organizations develop lots of ideas, but far too few take flight and make a material impact on performance. Often the issue is a lack of both speed and rigor in idea validation, incubation, and acceleration.

AUTOIMUNE REACTION - Successful entities are often effective at starving their emergent offspring. Whether new ventures are delayed by corporate policies, watered down by process, kept on a short leash by internal “customer owners,” or just relegated to organizational purgatory, the result is the same.

Leading companies see innovation as a journey. Innovation strategy, regularly reviewed, sets direction and brings any disruption to the surface. Successive innovation sprints provide the opportunity to “test and learn” from failure and MVPs. Business build and scale up maximize the returns on the most promising inventions. And innovation enablement ensures that companies have the right capabilities to keep up with changing markets.

To read the full article from BCG, please click here.