The New Book “Unpuzzling Innovation” Introduction Chapter 7 Innovation Gaps and Pitfalls

Innovation is the light every forward-looking organization is pursuing. However, for most businesses, innovation is still serendipitous, not so many people like innovation, because innovation stands for risk, and that associated with trouble, and innovation management has overall very low success rate. It is crucial to examine the causes of failure in innovation. The objective is to raise awareness of what’s needed to improve the probability of success and improve the success rate of innovation.
Innovation as a lip service: For many less innovative organizations, innovation is just a buzzword, everyone talks about it, but very few people, especially leaders really work on it. Great innovative leaders are those who can inspire a culture of innovation, be resourceful, and have a clear vision and strategy to manage a healthy innovation portfolio, identify and develop innovation practitioners. Innovation comes with a risk of failure, usually not well tolerated in a market governed by risk-allergic mindset. Innovation is costly most of the time. That is why you should really concentrate innovation on the main issues of your strategy. The innovation management can be iterative, evolutionary, revolutionary, or disruptive, but it must be marketable and implementable. IT is not just the new design or interface, it is taking the holistic approach to tuning it, tweaking it, changing it in a way that it brings the business benefit via mid or long term.
Lack of innovation execution capability: Innovation is not a one-time business initiative or an IT project only. Innovation is a disciplined approach to discovering and building opportunities in creating new meaningful sources of value to targeted users. Organizations have the lower level of maturity if they only implement a few innovation initiatives smoothly, but have stubbornly high failure rate in managing an innovation portfolio. Innovation has three phases: discovery of a problem or new ideas; designing a prototype solution and the ultimate delivery of a commercially astute outcome. Therefore, the best point of view is to see innovation as a system, capable of delivering organizational-wide capability. More specifically, building a balanced innovation portfolio is a practical approach for optimizing resource and improving risk intelligence.
Innovation talent blue: At creative organizations with highly innovative leadership, people are encouraged and given the time and resources to work on new things that excite them and figure out the better way to do things. However, in the traditional hierarchical organizations, creativity is discouraged and mediocrity is rewarded. The talent gap for creativity is enlarged due to the outdated talent management practices and ineffective performance management measurement. To overcome innovation blue, the workplace needs to be designed to help employees at all levels within an organization understand develop their creative capacity to solve problems and exploit opportunities in the new and innovative way. The heterogeneous team with cognitive differences is more innovative than the homogeneous group setting, and how creative the team is depending on the creative capacity of its member. It comprises a combination of factors that work together, flow, fluctuate, in harmony, in order to weave such creativity.

Don’t be afraid of the failure, but you have to learn something from your failure. It’s always fundamentally fears of failure - although it comes dressed in many disguises. It is important to identify gaps and avoid pitfalls on the way. You need to master your abilities and your team needs to master precision. This comes from first thinking through the work or situation, continually learning, making non-repeatable mistakes and taking calculated risks.Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu