Seven ways to kill innovation

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Innovation killer #5: View "different" and "new" as bad.

Ever watched a new idea shot down at time-warp speed with a derisive "that won't work"? Chances are the naysayer was one of the more entrenched execs. "This is the single greatest trap companies fall into," says Koulopoulos, "and it's a people issue: When you've invested yourself [in how things are], the last thing you want is for them to change."

But not being open to change is a big mistake, he says. Take the newspaper industry's initial refusal to acknowledge (and take advantage of) the disruption by the Internet. As a consequence, ad sales, newspapers' primary source of revenue, flatlined in 2006, according to the 2007 "State of the News Media" report by Project for Excellence in Journalism.

"I hear [a] lot of people talk about how media has less integrity - we're not editing, etcetera," says Koulopoulos. But, he points out news and media are being consumed differently, and the gap between the pre-Web model of media and the increasingly interactive version of it will only widen.

So are you going to stick to your "values" about the way things should be? Or do you respond to change and the need for innovation? Certainly the internal resistance can be difficult to overcome, but few companies can afford to cling to the past, he says.

Today's world requires companies to become more like a Gillette, which is "not afraid to eat its young," says Koulopoulos.

He says that the company will invest enormous amounts of money in developing products that will compete with existing ones, for one simple reason: If Gillette doesn't innovate on its products, someone else will.

Innovation tip: Study stories of people and companies that took risks. Also: Learn why fear of change is hardwired into our bodies.

Innovation killer # 6: Hand over the good ideas to the legal and accounting departments.

Ideas are fragile, easily broken or squashed. On the surface, giving the care of those ideas to legal or accounting may make sense, since one of the greatest issues with inventions are legal ones. And there are financial considerations as well.

But those with the most influence over the idea process must be the innovation champions, and that emphasis must come from the top, says Koulopoulos. CIO magazine's own research bears this out. At 61 per cent, the highest-scoring critical ingredient of an innovative culture was innovation-focused leadership, according to CIO's survey of 2007 CIO 100 winners. (Winners are chosen for innovations in IT that have transformed the company.)

Innovation tip: Create support and ownership for innovation at management's uppermost tiers.

Innovation killer #7: Be very, very afraid of failure.

Failure-tolerant management was the third most important ingredient in creating an innovative culture, according to CIO's survey; it came in at 25 per cent. There's a reason why this factor is so important.

No doubt you can build an iterative process and lessen the cost of a failure, says Koulopoulos, but the bottom line is the market is fickle and you can't predict what will happen.

Here's the scary truth: You will fail sometimes. Like a child learning to ride a bike, you simply cannot move ahead without taking a few knocks. The question is: Are you the kind of organization that can embrace innovation in spite of that?

Innovation tip: What doesn't work out is merely a learning experience and therefore fodder for the innovation cycle.

Use case studies, research and other support to show naysayers why learning experiences are a must in today's corporate environment.

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