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INNOVATION<br />
Tom Koulopoulos<br />
Industry’s leading futurists<br />
Seven<br />
<strong>Innovation</strong><br />
Killers that<br />
Companies<br />
should keep<br />
in mind<br />
You can’t live without innovation. It’s why<br />
you’re in business. But as you grow,<br />
innovation also becomes a threat. It<br />
threatens to disrupt your existing business<br />
model, products, and services. It threatens<br />
to upset your customers, who have become<br />
accustomed to a certain way of doing things.<br />
It threatens your partners and employees,<br />
who have developed expertise in the way<br />
things currently work. That’s the real reason<br />
innovation is so hard. While we espouse its<br />
values, we also build defenses against it.<br />
I call these the innovation killers. The<br />
innovation killers are almost always neatly<br />
disguised as protectors of the organization.<br />
Few people use these behaviors to try to kill<br />
innovation outright. Their intentions are always<br />
good ones: to minimize risk, to deliver predictability<br />
and operational excellence, and to satisfy market,<br />
customer, and analysts’ expectations. The<br />
innovation killers are staffed with armies of wellintentioned<br />
corporate citizens, ready to defend<br />
their turf and keep innovation at bay, lest it disrupt<br />
the certainty of the status quo.<br />
Guess what? If you’re looking for certainty, you’ve<br />
picked the wrong century. Get used to it, and get<br />
familiar with this list of seven innovation killers.<br />
These are the weeds that threaten to choke your<br />
garden; when you see them, pull them out by their<br />
roots.<br />
1Believe that innovation will just happen.<br />
Believing that innovation will just happen<br />
makes about as much sense as believing that<br />
a garden of perfectly formed roses will sprout in<br />
your backyard without any planting, weeding, or<br />
watering. The mistake most organizations make<br />
is that they expect innovation to come naturally,<br />
as part of their interactions with customers and<br />
the marketplace. The reality is that unless you’ve<br />
created an innovation-ready culture and an<br />
innovation practice, the clues that you get from<br />
the market will go largely unnoticed, since many<br />
of them will threaten the profitability of your current<br />
business model, products, and services.<br />
2Tell everyone to “think outside the box,”<br />
hold a brainstorming session, and then call<br />
it a day.<br />
Few companies I’ve worked with lack an abundance<br />
of good ideas. But ideas are not innovation. Ideas<br />
do not create value. Yet the focus in many of these<br />
companies is coming up with even more ideas, when<br />
what they should be doing is asking how they can<br />
evaluate and validate the best ideas. Companies<br />
that sustain innovation build, implement, and<br />
communicate a process to support innovation; they<br />
are constantly harvesting, evaluating, testing, and<br />
measuring the impact of ideas.<br />
3<br />
View “different” and “new” as bad.<br />
The number of very smart people I’ve heard<br />
say, “That’s just not the way we do it around<br />
here!” is the single most incredible aspect of my<br />
INNOVATIONANDTECH<br />
January | 2018<br />
43
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