Obstacles to innovation practice

The image prevails that lateral thinkers are difficult. Just as the court jester is not the king's murderer, so lateral thinkers are not simply troublemakers. There are quite a few who keep quiet and leave. Others take advantage of time freedoms and do what burns under their nails. They cannot act against their own convictions. However, many managers kowtow to the board or CEO. And it is precisely these adjustments that prevent innovation. Those who fear for their position are more likely to take bribes or get sick and do things by the book than those who feel secure. Security is a basic condition for learning from mistakes and for learning in general.

The problems of managers

Managers fear the competition and that in benchmarking their own know-how could be better used elsewhere instead of exploring it in their own environment. Managers also fear their own specialists becoming too important and jeopardizing their own position. They often believe that innovation involves immense expense, such as huge corporate events, expensive consultants and little output, while production would be neglected. The more they feel pressured by the strong franc, for example, the less free they feel to take uncertain risks with innovations. They are also afraid of investment costs, failed pilot projects and the uncertainty that success figures could suffer as a result. People prefer safe shrinkage and layoffs to an uncertain innovation project. The failure of a pilot project is often enough acknowledged with layoffs - to one's own detriment, because the person who did the learning leaves. The others start all over again.

Then, in many places, there is a constant distrust of their own employees. Bosses believe they know them well and don't trust them with innovations. But it is often the other way round - the bosses reject innovative ideas and are surprised when no new ones come along. Some new ideas are seen as a threat to current products or services, which is why they prefer to leave them to the competition. And last but not least, many company bosses do not want to cultivate a genuine culture of mistakes. Mistakes are punished instead of being seen as a source of innovation. Instead of welcoming criticism, they reject it. Finally, innovations fail due to a lack of staying power, because they rarely bring rapid monetary success and have to overcome many hurdles. Innovation projects that do not promise a payback within 18 months are often not even discussed.

The problem of successful companies

It is in the nature of innovation that successfully launched products are maintained with continuous improvement, while failures increase the willingness to make radical changes. Take Nokia, for example: 2007 was not only the year of the launch of the iPhone, but also one of the most successful years for Nokia, with a mobile phone market share of 41%. Nokia was quite innovative: they saw the future in smartphones, but success made the company unwilling to take high risks.

Investment fear

Procurement is still looking for the cheapest supplier, although it has long been clear that this is neither a sustainable nor a safe solution. It almost looks as if the throwaway mentality also exists in companies. I buy where it's cheap today, tomorrow the store may be broken, then there's bound to be another somewhere else for it, which of course is not always the case - certainly not with the same quality. The same mentality is in the fear of investment. If an idea doesn't pay off within 18 months, it ends up on the scrap heap. In plain language, this is a decision against innovation and waiting for others (countries or organizations) to adopt or pick up what doesn't succeed here immediately. Innovation requires staying power and far-sighted forward thinking.

The problem of stakeholder analysis

How do you get the important information about what customers really think and want? Migros wanted to find out exactly that with Migipedia. You can evaluate products and of course do so with those you like. But advertising and self-promotion crushes any innovation and the sense of a critical examination of the products. If you want to grasp market needs, you have to ask your competitors' customers why they are there. They would have to ask the cumulus cardholders who have few sales on the card. Then they would learn more about real consumer needs. It's not about Likes behind a product. It's about getting to know the customer with their concerns. Migipedia is certainly a step in the right direction, and the community (why only logging in and Cumulus?) at least enables discussion among the "digital natives".

Many companies now believe that they get to know their customers via Facebook and forums. But this is a new trap, because no profound research is done on innovations. Migros did not clarify its entry into the healthcare market in the community and buys 22 medical practices that previously belonged to Swica. As Staminski says in his book "Myth of Customer Orientation " "Decision makers cannot interpret customer data. "1 They are far too distant and have little instinct for what customer megatrends are.

Facebook and forums are hardly enough to understand customer needs exactly, but they are enough to contact some customers. The online community does not replace direct contact, nor does it reflect the entire market. However, the survival of businesses in the future will depend on understanding customer needs. This often requires unusual approaches, lateral thinkers and people who dare to face non-customers and critics.

Innovations use core competencies in a completely new way

Core competencies exhibit the following five characteristics:

1. real competitive advantage

2. high entry barriers for competitors

3. high customer benefit

4. sustainability

5. transferability to other organisational units 2

Core competencies are often defined too narrowly and therefore resist the idea of innovation. A core competence can be the production of a certain engine component of the Porsche brand. In this case, the company is dependent on Porsche if there are no other core competencies. But if the core competencies are die casting, extrusion, 3-D CAD and rapid prototyping, these competencies become open to other possibilities, even if initially the competitive advantage is no longer quite so clear. Lateral thinking has a lot to do with transferring processes.

With knowledge to innovation?

A study by the National Fund3 states: Companies hope (above all) to become more innovative with training and new employees. However, knowledge carriers are rarely lateral thinkers, but people with specific training and contacts. Knowledge alone has nothing to do with innovation.

Now there are organizations that hire an innovation manager to drive developments. He is characterized by the fact that he is allowed to say and do things that the other employees are not allowed to do. But the bought-in innovation manager soon becomes part of the company - and is then no longer allowed to change the boundaries that were initially set, or even sees any opportunities. Innovation dies because it is not lived comprehensively.

There are connoisseurs of innovation models like Scrum who claim that a complete ISO 9001 can be mapped with Scrum. Agile structures can therefore include a quality system. Thus Scrum methods should also be implementable in other organizations - as the flow concept already made possible in the past. But these innovations need other cultures and above all the size to admit mistakes and not to punish them, and the courage not to tear up unfinished concepts, but to appreciate and accept them. Group processes can certainly be conducive to innovation if they have protected frameworks and rules. But then the HR department must also learn to search for personnel according to other criteria.

Live innovation

If it is clear that things cannot continue in the old style, what then? Can a management system be geared towards innovation? That is precisely the goal of Business Excellence and the new ISO standards. Genuine anchoring of innovation also protects against crises. But for this to happen, there must be a basis that is anchored throughout the company. And these are of a cultural nature, such as dealing with mistakes, the readiness for projects that have not been worked out in detail, or the management's ability to take criticism. Although the work is very flexible, the focus is on sustainable success - otherwise it would not be an innovation, but just hype.

But one stumbles over fixed clichés. For example, are older women expected to innovate or do they have to be young and pretty? Yet it is precisely those employees who have already been employed in various companies who can contribute the most to innovation. They already carry the benchmark as a person, so to speak. Moreover, they have already made the mistakes that younger people are yet to make. Thinking innovatively also means looking the truth in the eye and calling mistakes by their names. This not only protects you from recalls and other unpleasant legal proceedings, but also releases energy for sustainable learning and lots of successful projects.