Organizations often pursue innovation as a means of making their businesses grow and thus becoming more competitive,; however, there are factors that may slow down the process. It is possible to recognize the presence of these phenomena and work towards eliminating their impact on the development of creativity. Here’s how to tackle common barriers to innovation:Here’s how to tackle common barriers to innovation:
1. Cultivate a Supportive Culture: Basically, innovation is the capacity to produce new ideas to new situations and this happens where there is freedom to take risks. Encourage the management to act as coaches who protect employees willing to try new things and experiment; who ensure that workers will not be punished if something goes wrong.
2. Encourage Collaboration: There is nothing as worse as having departments working in isolation without any interface to other departments as it hinders innovation. Encourage departments to collaborate in solving tasks assigned to them and establish conditions for sharing information. That is why it is possible to observe that different visions promote innovation and new approaches.
3. Allocate Resources: Dr. Scott reminded the students that innovation needs time, talent, and money. Make sure that there are enough funds for the R&D and give the teams the necessary tools with which they can either explore and/or enforce new concepts.
4. Streamline Processes: Organizational culture which limits amburgers creativity and which is characterized by an excessive number of bureaucratic rules and lengthy approval procedures hampers innovative efforts. Eliminate redundancies in decision-making procedures in order to increase the rate of creation and introduction of innovations.
5. Embrace Failure: An employee can be afraid of failure, which stops him from doing innovative things. Promote a mental culture composed of risk taking, which means that failures are not just acceptable, but are also expected as part of an innovative process. Always encourage the volunteers and ensure that they receive something even if it is a token in cases that the goals set are not achieved.
6. Stay Customer-Centric: It is imperative that innovation has to solve genuine customers’ needs and their problems. Include the customers in your processes so that they can express their problems to you which will help on the aspect of innovation.
7. Invest in Training: Empower the employees and provide with them with the tool required for innovation. To strengthen their capacity to work on new technologies, creativity, and innovative approaches to problems to allow them to contribute in improved innovation projects, offer exposure to new trends.
These barriers should be systematically overcome and the right conditions for effective innovation should be created so that businesses would be able to develop constantly.
