Top 6 barriers to breakthrough innovation
Over the last decade-plus, we’ve gained some perspective on common barriers to innovation. While we always find new ways to break through these barriers, we continue to observe the same key challenges keeping organizations from creating a more wide-ranging, meaningful impact. Interestingly, it seems these barriers don’t discriminate – we’ve seen them across all sectors: large and small, public or private, for-profit and nonprofit organizations. Despite their prevalence, our passion for helping teams unlock the potential obstructed by these barriers continues to inspire us every day.
1. Roads to Nowhere (Lack of vision)
It’s especially difficult to chart a future path if no one knows where they’re heading. Many organizations evolve from a legacy of operational success that can mask the original vision for the organization. Worse yet, some organizations simply don’t have a defined purpose. Whatever the case, it’s always a breakdown of leadership. When leaders define a singular, meaningful, unwavering vision for the organization, it gives clarity and confidence to an innovation process and unifies the momentum of the stakeholders involved.
2. The Blinders of Silos (Fragmented structures)
Organizing people into different departments is a proven concept for operational efficiency, but it’s often the reason for an unstructured approach to innovation. Opportunities for innovation often lie in the gaps between the departments, only no one can see them. Most importantly, customers and constituents experience an offering holistically, yet the result of a fragmented organization is a fragmented product. Innovation requires a systemic approach that blurs the lines between organizational departments.
3. Tunnel Vision (Overly narrow focus)
It’s easy to get caught up in the task at hand, but innovation requires taking a broader lens. Too often, organizations focus all their energy on the details of a product or service and miss the big picture of how they fit in the world. Understanding the context is crucial to finding opportunities and framing them appropriately.
4. Built to Kill (Shortsighted decision-making)
At the end of the day, true innovation means change. Often, bigger innovation requires bigger change to the status quo. Unfortunately, many organizations have adopted a culture that seeks to avoid change at all costs as it’s perceived only as risk. Thus, the decision-making approaches are focused solely on the impact to next month or next quarter, and potentially disruptive ideas are routinely dismissed. In reality, often the biggest risk is not changing. Innovation approaches require decisive and often courageous decision-making that can tolerate risk and incentivize change across multiple time horizons.
5. Fear Factor (Cultures of fear)
It’s especially difficult to encourage innovation if an organization routinely punishes failure. While no organization should tolerate poor performance, innovation requires an acceptance of risk and experimentation. Yet too many organizations send cultural signals that people risk losing their job if they fail. Innovation processes thrive off the intelligence learned from trying a new idea and failing so that the idea can be improved. And the greatest innovation asset an organization has is the untapped potential in its people.
6. Virtual Unreality (Disconnect from real people)
It sounds obvious, but all too often organizations lose touch with the people they serve. It’s not that organizations forget who their customer is, it’s that they don’t deeply understand them as human beings and how their product or service fits into their lives. Richly understanding the stakeholders surrounding an organization reveals their real needs that can spawn innovation.
The first step to driving impact is a conversation. Contact us today to explore ways you can navigate these barriers.