Corporate Innovation Myths: It's Not as Risky as You Think

Myth #1: Innovation Almost Always Fails

By now, you might be familiar with the fact that up to 95% of business innovations fail. Rather than allowing this to dishearten you or the innovators in your organization, it should be an incentive to fail repeatedly, kill ideas early, and try again until the right ideas emerge. The iterative process, will not only improve the products and services you are working on, it will also help you to separate your organization from many of its competitors, thus giving you a competitive edge.

Moreover, cultivating a tolerance to failure gives employees a chance to learn from their failed ideas and potentially extrapolate useful data from them. Every time you check off another idea that won’t work, you get closer to finding the one that will. 

Myth #2: The Organization Lacks the Right Innovators

Research shows that 59% of company executives have doubts about the capabilities of their employees. However, gaining more ideas from diverse perspectives can unlock far greater results, since, according to research, diversity leads to better problem solving.

Sometimes, innovators also simply need access to the right tooling to unleash their creativity. The KICKBOX Intrapreneurship program for example, is a hands-on solution that helps companies encourage innovation by guiding employees through structured steps to develop and implement new ideas. Ideas can be implemented and tested at scale, while the program's bottom-up approach is supported by gamification to make innovation both accessible and engaging for the entire workforce. 

The program's stage-gate approach, also allows innovators to cultivate an intrapreneurial mindset, unlocking new levels of creativity, encouraging autonomy and allowing for greater risk-taking behaviour.

Myth #3: Innovation Must be Disruptive

If an organization already holds an established place in the market, leaders might think that it's not necessary to change something that is already working well or 'fix something that isn’t broken'. However, there are different approaches to innovation which don't equate to a complete overhaul of the company’s philosophies, brand positioning, or even it's way of functioning.

For example, innovations tend to require an iterative approach, including products that have already been released to market. Therefore, a corporate innovation strategy that focuses largely on incremental innovation to drive the business forward and deliver greater value to the customer can be particularly productive.

Similarly, if you think innovation has to disrupt the workflows and everyday schedules of employees and the way you do business, it doesn’t. The best ideas are born organically, not through scheduled creative sessions. You should give employees the freedom to work on ideas when they arrive, as opposed to a scheduled weekly or monthly time slot. 

Myth #4: Innovation is too Expensive

Finally, it would be easy to assume that innovation is too expensive. In reality, introducing tools like Idea Management makes it very cost-efficient, especially when you take the streamlined innovation development into account, whereby ideas are evaluated early on, to ensure that only those with the most potential move forward in the innovation process.

Research shows that R&D spending by U.S. organizations, for example, is at an all-time high, but a large percentage can be attributed to spending too much time and resources on the wrong innovations or ideas that will ultimately not be profitable. The use of MVPs (Minimum Viable Products), Virtualizations and testing can help you to identify failures quickly and allow you to avoid costly errors. This also provides employees to dedicate more time to winning ideas while still learning quickly from failures. Decentralized operations and smooth, real-time collaborations will reduce delays while also putting less strain on your resources. 

From a financial perspective, embracing corporate innovation with a modern solution that facilitates a company-wide buy-in should reduce running costs.

Many of the myths surrounding corporate innovation can hinder companies to evolve and grow. While innovation is never without risk, there are ways in which these risks can be minimized and strategies which can be implemented to prepare for risks that might arise throughout the innovation process. By making failure a part of the process, encouraging intrapreneurship and utilizing the right tools to make innovation a reality in your organization, companies can nurture an innovation culture. In companies where risk-taking becomes a norm, innovation will flourish.