You hear about companies investing in innovation left, right, and center but are they actually producing any? The majority of large companies have realized that their infrastructure is incapable of supporting innovative changes. In this article at Harvard Business Review, Steve Blank helps you analyze if your company is working on real innovation or just the idea.
Getting Real with Innovation
Several top-level meetings are taking place in large firms, but no action is resulting out of those. The simple reason for such a constraint is that these organizations are not as agile as startups. To facilitate real work, you must change the workforce mindset, corporate culture, and internal processes.
Below are the challenges that stop companies from working on actual innovation:
Entangled in Processes: Startups are ready to take risks for new ideas, consumer base, milestones, vision, etc. Once they identify their market and start earning, they settle down and create processes. The processes help streamline their day-to-day activities with repeatable problems.
You need to think outside the box when a new problem comes in and that is when these processes become more of a hindrance than guidance. While they reduce risk, they also lower your agility and innovation capabilities.
More Emphasis on Policies than Products: Large companies owe their business success to their long-standing processes. However, while product people want to create, process people want to document before creation. The majority of the government offices are filled with people that are process-oriented and take long-winding steps to reach a decision. So, large companies seek government contracts and restrict the progress of those that are ready for practical initiatives.
What Goes in the Name of Innovation: Large organizations seek consultants that can help to make innovation-ready changes to the company’s internal policies. However, these steps are reactive and cannot cater to the evolving industry demands.
Nonetheless, in the name of innovation, the consultants conduct workshops, brainstorming sessions, etc. Though this might create an innovative mindset, the companies are far behind in creating anything groundbreaking. Also, creativity cannot be measured by KPIs that the governments and companies have placed.
To view the original article in full, visit the following link: https://hbr.org/2019/10/why-companies-do-innovation-theater-instead-of-actual-innovation
