Five Major Barriers of Innovation that You Must Avoid

• August 10, 2012
• Jesandy
• no comments

Innovation can’t be planned or scheduled. It depends on a number of things coming together. Here we examine some of the barriers to innovation.

Lack of a strategy for Innovation

Without an innovation strategy, a company shouldn’t be surprised if it has little innovation. A company may have no innovation strategy simply because it never thought about having one. Perhaps it never expected to innovate. Sometimes companies don’t have an innovation strategy because it never thought about having one. Perhaps it never expected to innovate. Sometime companies don’t have an innovation strategy because they do not understand innovation. They expect it to “just happen.” In many cases, a company invests in innovation by allocating funds to research, but it doesn’t have a systematic strategic for innovating and may be learning about and refining technologies without applying them. Some companies have a strategy for innovation, but it’s the wrong one. The innovation strategy need to appropriate for a company’s market, core competencies, and vision. The Customer base was rich with ideas for innovative products. The former company didn’t find innovation in the lab, while its competitor found them in the marketplace

Failure to Implement

Innovation is work, While all product strategies require a lot of work to implement, innovation strategies suffer most from the misconception that “it will come to you”. A Study of innovation clearly shows that it doesn’t happen that way, so once strategy is chosen, work need to be done. Implementation begins by assigning responsibility. An individual or team needs to have the responsibility and resources to implement the innovation strategy. Innovation isn’t just workl it’s hard work. Too many companies that launch an innovation strategy start developing the first opportunity they come across. Many opportunities should be identified and reviewed, and only the very best should be founded.

Lack of Vision

A Core strategic vision is necessary to guide any innovation strategy. It indicates which opportunities fit the company’s strategic direction and which do not. An outdated vision can also hinder innovation. For instance ene company making mainframe computer peripheral had the opportunity and technical talent to develop local area networking systems for workstations and personal computer

Inadequate Core Competencies

As explained in chapter 6, expansion into new markets requires the leverages of a strong base of core competencies. This is also true of expansion through innovation strategies. Without suffucient core competencies, it’s difficult for a company to identify innovations it can successfully pursue. If a company has limited core competencies, it needs to restrict its innovation strategy. In an extreme case , a company may need to strengthen its core competencies before it initiates any innovation or expansion strategy.

Market Resistance to Change

The biggest barrier to innovation is resistance to Change. Nobody wanted to upset the way thing were usually done and be incompatible with training or experience. Frequently, an innovation will require customers to do something different or new to benefit will require customers to do something different or new benefit from the innovation. This can be a barrier to making the innovation successfull, and market education may be necessary to achieve early acceptance