Hurdles for Innovation

Invention spawns innovations. From mobile phones to laptops, from cars to space shuttles - everything is a result of a person's craving to take that one step further towards perfection. What needs to be apprehended here is the fact that ideas are dime a dozen. Only when an idea is skillfully nurtured fully comprehending its implications as well as its complications, innovation takes place.

In today's business climate, many organizations acknowledge the need for constant innovation. Every organization dreams of finding the magic bullet that will increase creativity, boost productivity, and improve morale. Surprisingly, some of the best solutions are counter-intuitive and run against conventional wisdom.

So what really stops an organization from innovating. Here are a few reasons according to Chris Curran that might seem plausible:

No proper assignment of roles and responsibilities: It is most often found that whenever in an organization an innovation venture is undertaken, there is negligence towards assigning related roles to the adequate persons. As a result, employees work in a chaotic environment and work politics ensues.
Expecting a fixed ROI: Innovation is about probing the unseen. As such, putting on the table a fixated ROI is frustrating at times for the personals involved in innovating as it doesn't allow them to explore an idea to its potential.
Scope undefined: An unclear scope of innovation will obstruct the formation of a skilled work force group trying to innovate, cardinally resulting in the failure of their mission.
Lack of synchronization: Organizations often fragment units for innovation purposes. But sometimes these units are totally overlooked, mainly because of investment issues, as a result of which innovation is hindered.

Any organization needs a method to capture ideas and provide a readily available source of basic concepts to feed into the corporate innovation process. But it needs more than that. Innovation is essentially a creative activity and requires freedom of thought and action. To accommodate this, a formal framework must be established to channel the activities into corporate assets. And maybe we will be able to travel in time someday.