Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire

Chapter 10. Keeping the Lights On: SUSTAINABILITY BLOCKAGES

The Key Dangers

• Viewing innovation as a temporary, extraordinary effort in response to a crisis, or pursuing innovation as a competitive response.

• Treating innovation as the domain of only the R&D or Marketing department, or some other subgroup.

• Treating innovation as a project-based activity, instead of as an integral organizational capability to be invested in and professionally managed.

• Having no systems in place for managing the organization's innovation activities.

• Not investing time and energy into making your organization more flexible and adaptable so that it can cope with the increasing pace of change that innovation introduces.

Overview

Success can be blinding. Organizations often drive themselves by trying to look through the windscreen and in the rearview mirror, only to get blindsided by something from the left or the right. Put another way, organizations often focus on what they've already done and moving it forward (often in an incremental way). Organizations also invest in defending and extending the core products and services that made them successful—focusing a huge amount of energy on protecting their flank. Don't get me wrong, incremental innovation is important, but all of your competitors are trying to make their products and services incrementally better than yours at the same time. At best, your efforts will allow you to maintain or make slight improvements in revenue and profitability. And of course, companies ...