Innovation Slump, Low Innovation Rate, Dew Drops, Ravichander Rao
Why is the level of innovation low though the potential of human mind is immense? Innovation has been mantra for a while and more so in this recession. The company that innovates would survive and gain leadership, and the ones that do not will sink. Paraphrasing the legendary Peter Drucker, innovation should lead to either improvement in the customer experience or should give product a competitive edge (enhancements) or drive the cost of ownership down. Clearly, innovation allows a company to add significant value to their product line. Yet, the rate of innovation is low, despite the fact that company would promote all efforts to drive innovation!
There are at least two reasons for this - creativity challenged and problem of like mindedness. Creativity is an innate ability. Some amount of training can make you an artist, but training cannot make you creative. Creativity develops through a lot of observation and deliberation. The problem of an artist (which most of us are) is that he gets shackled by paradigms which enabled him to be an artist. The sequential thought process of analysing problems creates paradigm traps, which he is unable to break. Whereas a creative person does not fall in to paradigm traps. He challenges the existing paradigms and is able to search for the alternatives or may be he is able to jump from one paradigm to another to search for alternatives. But the people with this ability are very few. The second problem of like mindedness is that the organizations today are homogeneous. A technology company will be full of engineers, an ad agency will be full of artists and so on. Within each organization of a company the degree of homogeneity is even higher. A part of the reason is, within an organization the educational background and training of the employees is uniform. If all employees are alike, there is no diversity of ideas. If you ask 10 employees on how to solve the problem, you won't get 10 different answers, but 1 answer or at the maximum 2 different answers. In such situation, even though there is an intent to innovate, there is no great scope for innovation.
Any other reasons?
Why is the level of innovation low though the potential of human mind is immense? Innovation has been mantra for a while and more so in this recession. The company that innovates would survive and gain leadership, and the ones that do not will sink. Paraphrasing the legendary Peter Drucker, innovation should lead to either improvement in the customer experience or should give product a competitive edge (enhancements) or drive the cost of ownership down. Clearly, innovation allows a company to add significant value to their product line. Yet, the rate of innovation is low, despite the fact that company would promote all efforts to drive innovation!
There are at least two reasons for this - creativity challenged and problem of like mindedness. Creativity is an innate ability. Some amount of training can make you an artist, but training cannot make you creative. Creativity develops through a lot of observation and deliberation. The problem of an artist (which most of us are) is that he gets shackled by paradigms which enabled him to be an artist. The sequential thought process of analysing problems creates paradigm traps, which he is unable to break. Whereas a creative person does not fall in to paradigm traps. He challenges the existing paradigms and is able to search for the alternatives or may be he is able to jump from one paradigm to another to search for alternatives. But the people with this ability are very few. The second problem of like mindedness is that the organizations today are homogeneous. A technology company will be full of engineers, an ad agency will be full of artists and so on. Within each organization of a company the degree of homogeneity is even higher. A part of the reason is, within an organization the educational background and training of the employees is uniform. If all employees are alike, there is no diversity of ideas. If you ask 10 employees on how to solve the problem, you won't get 10 different answers, but 1 answer or at the maximum 2 different answers. In such situation, even though there is an intent to innovate, there is no great scope for innovation.
Any other reasons?
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