Top Reasons Why Innovation Fails – Part 2

Puzzle lightWhy do innovation initiatives fail? This Fast Company article lists six reasons your organization may be experiencing setbacks.

In our first blog post, we explored reason #1, i.e. how lacking a formal framework can hinder successful innovation. In this blog post, I’ll dive in to reason #2: Not tying initiatives to overall company strategy.

Tie Your Initiatives to Company Strategy

Once you have a formal framework in place, ensure your innovation initiatives tie in to your organization’s strategy. This includes understanding your goals both in the long term and short term, plus the steps you are taking to achieve them.

Leverage “Idea Challenges”

How do you ensure the submission of quality, focused ideas that complement your organization’s strategy?

Idea challenges can help you achieve this:

An “Idea Challenge” is a time-limited campaign to solicit ideas focused on a specific problem.

Idea challenges have been used to spark ideas in many contexts – including entrepreneurial competitions, such as MIT’s IDEAS Global Challenge. In their challenge, teams have a finite amount of time to innovate solutions for developing communities. The result is a team who is motivated by a tight deadline and a focused goal.

Idea challenges offer you 2 key advantages:

  1. They create focus by pinpointing a specific problem before asking for employee input.
  2. They create urgency by creating a short time limit for submitting ideas.

Want to learn more about idea challenges, and how to run your own? Check out our free white paper.

Putting It All Together

Idea challenges offer you a great way to tie innovation initiatives to your organizational strategy. By running regular idea challenges once every 2-4 weeks, you can innovate in sync with your strategy.

Suggested Next Steps:

Lauren MacLeod

Hello, I'm your author, Lauren MacLeod. I spend a lot of my time researching the best practices for innovation management, and writing articles to share them. I hope you find them helpful! I work at Accompa - one of our products is IdeaGlow innovation management software.

More Posts - Website

Check out these things!

Like This Post? Get More by Email
Get new posts like this delivered right to your inbox...

(We value your privacy)
Innovation Management Software for Your Team
Want to build your own systematic innovation management process? Check out IdeaGlow now - it is a cloud-based idea management system that is affordable...