by Kumar Mehta
Despite the countless books and articles written about innovation, we don’t have a good understanding about what drives innovation within organizations. Instead, we have multiple, often conflicting, theories about what makes innovation happen. We follow the one that resonates best with us or is in vogue. As a result, innovation efforts at many companies suffocate as they stumble along, thinking they are on the right path but not really knowing where they are headed.
The way to build an environment where innovation happens consistently is to make certain that the foundational building blocks that drive innovation are present. Few companies have built such an environment, what I call an innovation biome . The companies that have built this environment are the ones we admire as they are the ones that bring the most innovative offerings to the world.
In the rest of the companies, though, the most common reason that innovations fail is this: others reject an idea because they don’t have the right tools to evaluate the idea.
Overcoming disbelievers and naysayers
In most companies, when someone has an idea it has to climb up several layers of management, requiring a yes at every level for it to keep climbing.
A single no going up the management staircase can kill an idea. Since no one is ever penalized for saying no (you only get hurt for saying yes to the wrong thing), companies often develop cultures that are conservative and not conducive to innovation.
Just about every major innovation in history was rejected by the experts of the time.
Whether it was the earliest people who believed the earth is round, or Darwin’s theory of evolution, or Pasteur’s theory of germs, disbelievers and naysayers have always shown up in full force. This has never stopped. Experts thought the Personal Computer would not be successful, nor the automobile, nor the telephone (presumably the telephone was never supposed to catch on because there was no shortage of messenger boys).
This still happens every day in companies around the world.
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