Innovation Climate A conditio for making innovation work The need for business innovation In today’s dynamic business environment product life cycles are becoming shorter and consumer preferences are changing faster than ever. In the global economy new emerging competitors can popup from anywhere. And, these new emerging competitors are more than ever able to quickly develop successful business concepts and capture large shares of market. At the same time radical new technologies are advancing and are near the edge of their commercial breakthrough. Traditional products and business concepts run the risk of becoming obsolete within a short period of time. These trends compel the established corporations to innovate and develop alternative business models. Satisfying Innovation results? In many corporations the urgency to innovate is very well understood. Nevertheless, we find more than once a striking discrepancy between companies’ strategic intentions and the actual innovation performance when one looks at the innovation and business development results. Despite the plethora of warnings, intentions, statements and plans, the actual outcome of innovation activities is often rather dissatisfying. Critics see corporations as inflexible archaic conglomerates that fail to generate streams of really profitable revolutionary ideas, needed for sustained growth and strategic renewal. Is their claim unjustified? Why innovating is so difficult Especially large, focused organizations have a finely tuned immune system to combat deviations from plan, i.e. “deliver according to expectations”. This same immune system has a tendency to wipe out innovation initiatives, which are in essence deviant in nature.
The immune system expresses itself in elements of the corporate culture (e.g. beliefs, values, leadership style, teamwork style and other issues of group behavior) combined with structures (e.g. rules, procedures, systems). These are often root causes for the innovation difficulties. Innovation cannot emerge or be developed because of the organization’s very own inhibiting climate. For over a decade we have assisted our clients with innovation programs. We have helped to launch new products, services and businesses. In these years we have seen a lot of the corporate innovation practice. Based on our experience and insights we came to understand what important success factors are for innovation. Managing the innovation climate A fact of innovation life is the point that you have to simultaneously manage different innovation issues that are often contradictory. One of the closely held notions about innovation is that the individual intrapreneur is the essential ingredient in every successful innovation. It is argued that it is the personal effort of an intrapreneur that determines the innovation success. But it may be evident that the single innovator cannot accomplish anything without help. To achieve results the innovator needs a supportive organization around himself and his idea. So, it is a matter of both individual and collective effort. In the same vein you need balance between analytical planning and intuition. Innovation is often a process where creativity, inspiration and gut feeling are needed. But once the decision is made to develop the idea into real business – analysis, effective planning and project management are crucial. We found that for effective innovation, a bridging between collectivity – individuality, and planning intuition is needed. In our model these form our four basic dimensions.
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