Innovation Playbook – Is There an Innovation Glass Ceiling?

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by: Idris Mootee

I wanted to post the second part of slides
today but I am in Chicago this week and have no access to my other Thinkpad. So
I will just write about it and follow up with the slides next week.

There are no doubts many barriers to
innovation. Or you can say there is a glass ceiling and you hit that ceiling
pretty easily.

Organizational structure and capital resource
allocation process can be considered as hard structural barriers to innovation.
Less obvious challenges include the attitudes of people towards risks and
accommodating the “misfits” (The best innovators I’ve known are the
“misfits”). What stop company from innovating?

Organization Inertia. Discontinuous innovation costs a lot of brain cells for a potentially
exciting but uncertain reward. Instead of taking leaps into the unknown it is
often easier and more predictable to squeeze a little bit more performance or
creating extensions or simply cut cost through consolidation.

Short-termism. The all-pervasive factor is that of short-termism. This is the
innovation paradox in which companies do not innovate purposefully or
ambitiously, even though they recognize its importance, because of quarterly
reporting.

Corpporate Culture and
DNA.
Companies have not invested in their innovation
framework or processes. Innovation framework and best practices are not
commonly known and applied.

Open Innovation. An open innovation model opens up the funnel that needs to be adapted
to encompass flows of ideas outside an organization. Managers outside the tech
world are not trained to exploit external innovations. It can be difficult for
a business steeped in the principles of competition to embrace co-opetition.
How do you co-innovating with your competitors? The way companies generate
ideas and bring them to market has been undergoing a fundamental change. In the
old model of closed innovation, enterprises adhered to the following
philosophy: Successful innovation requires full control, from generating ideas,
product development, manufacturing, marketing, to distribution. For the last 50
years, that model worked well, but not anymore.

Look at what Facebook is doing today. It is
the first social networking site to open its operating system to outside
developers. At its first public event at the SF Design Center this May,
Facebook announced that it will give access to third-party developers like
Amazon, Digg, Photobucket and Twitter – to build applications that will be
integrated into the new Facebook Platform. Zuckerberg admited that with just
some 85 engineers, they can’t possibly compete with thousands of developers
creating social applications. He also said Facebook will be competing with
those guys on a level playing field.