When organisations try to innovate, they go in with the best intentions of driving real change. But time and again I see the same mistakes crop up that put people off pursuing innovation.
There are more than seven mistakes, these are just the ones I encounter most. Take them onboard before running your own innovation programme, or call in the experts to help guide you through your innovation process.
Mistake 1: No clear brief
It’s not uncommon to be asked to ‘do innovation’ without a clear brief of what it means. If you don’t have a clear understanding of what innovation means for your organisation, you will not be able to identify what success looks like.
If innovation feels like an undefined buzzword, be open when asking innovation consultants to pitch. Most will be happy to help you work with your senior management team to define the brief as well as how they will help you achieve success.
Mistake 2: Your organisation isn’t really committed
Many organisations claim to want to be innovative and drive change, but when it comes down to it they don’t really want to. They’re not actually making the changes necessary – mentally, physically, or financially – to foster innovation.
Most weeks someone talks to me about how they were brought in to an organisation to innovate, to be a maverick and shake things up, but when they arrive there is no real appetite or budget for innovation or change after all.
To innovate, you must define what exactly your organisation means by innovation and how much money, time and effort they are prepared to put into driving real strategic change.
Mistake 3: Expecting the moon on a stick
Most organisations have a list of innovation problems they think are simple to solve. For example, create an innovation culture and get a new (successful) product to market by the end of the financial year.
Change takes time. Usually, these requests are not possible with the budget available and the timeframe requested.
Be realistic about what you, an innovation consultant or agency can deliver, and prioritise what is the most important.
Mistake 4: Expecting change to happen overnight
A workshop is a good start, and it is just that: the start. Sustainable innovation and making change happen takes time, continual effort and requires behavioural change. This does not happen overnight.
If you run a workshop, or commission someone else to, ensure there is time and resource set aside to follow-up on actions, embed the learning and keep momentum for the ideas.
If you fail to do this, the workshop is a waste of time and resource. It can even demotivate employees as the enthusiasm that is built up in a workshop is crushed when nothing changes once the workshop is over.
Mistake 5: Outsource your innovation process
Innovation requires a process, one that facilitates ideas and enables them to happen, but this alone will not drive change.
You also need an inspired team focused on why innovation is important and clear on their role in achieving it. Involve employees in the development of their innovation process.
It will help to engage them as to why it is important, provide ownership and buy-in for making change happen.
Mistake 6: Not understanding risk and believing that all innovative ideas will work
Innovation is not guaranteed to work and neither, in a fast changing world, are the current ideas, products and processes that you have.
Accept and communicate with your team that a new idea or process is not guaranteed to succeed.
Failure is an important and necessary part of innovation.
J.K. Rowling said, “It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default.”
Mistake 7: Thinking that innovation is too expensive
Innovation is a business survival strategy; however you choose to resource it, you simply can’t afford not to do it.
Consider Kodak who, despite inventing digital photography in the 1970s failed to innovate in response to the growth of digital photography. They went bankrupt in 2012.
Work with the resource you have available for innovation and absolutely focus on the purpose of your innovation.
If you need help overcoming your mistakes and leading your team to think clearly, work together and get better results, get in touch lucy@lucidity.org.uk.
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