Why do so many organizations find innovation so hard?

I think there are a number of reasons that innovation is challenging and difficult in organizations.  The first one is pretty simple – most new ideas are bad.  If you look at stats about product failure, you’re going to see studies citing between 60 to 95 percent of new products failing.  For the very simple reason that most new ideas are bad, that presents challenges for organizations trying to innovate.

In line with that is the idea that change is difficult and often damaging in the short term.  You think about innovation, which is broadly defined as change in a product or service that enhances the experience of stakeholders.  When you engage in a change, things are often going to get worse before they get better.  I like to call this slipping into the performance trough.  If you are in an organization and you have P&L responsibility, no one wants to be caught slipping into that performance trough. So, that prospect of things getting worse before they get better holds a lot of people back from changing and innovating.  That’s another reason that change is just difficult besides the fact that most new ideas are bad.

A third challenge, and this is a little counterintuitive, is that core competencies can actually become core rigidities.  The very things that have made organizations successful in the past can actually cause their demise and make it very challenging to innovate.  This is because the things that you do well you tend to emphasize and reinforce and hone over time and continue to repeat such that you develop what some people might call a core competency in that area.  The challenge is that people tend to overexploit those competencies past their useful lives. I think Chrysler is a pretty good example of sort of a company that fell into this trap.  In the early 60s, Chrysler introduced the first SUV, the Wagoneer.  A few years later in the early 80s, Chrysler introduced another first, the first minivan.

Over the next 20 years, Chrysler continued to refine its capabilities as a truck and SUV powerhouse.  They actually sold just a little over 10 million minivans worldwide fine tuning that line and introducing and reinforcing their pickup and truck lines.  They have the Rams and Dakotas and Durangos.  Really by the turn of the century, Chrysler had the largest share of pickups, minivans, and SUVs.  But, think about what’s happened lately in the automobile industry.  The price of oil has made these gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs quickly fall out of favor with many consumers.  While other big automakers producing SUVs and trucks have responded to the change by retooling plants in order to manufacture new compact and subcompact cars to produce more fuel efficient four-cylinder engines, Chrysler didn’t do much.  They continued to exploit those heavy truck and SUV capabilities to the point that it became very difficult for the organization to compete.  Thus, a third challenge is that core competencies that have been critical to your organization’s success in the past often become core rigidities and can prevent innovation.

The last thing that makes innovation challenging is what you might consider the innovator’s dilemma.  One thing that you are sure to learn in an MBA class on marketing is to listen to your customers.  When it comes to innovation, by listening to your customers, you’re always just going to give them more and better on the things that they already desire.  What studies show is that when a new technology enters, very rarely is the incumbent in a position of power. This is because new technologies often relate to new customers that value a different bundle of attributes.  Listening to your customers is good, but often those customers are just going to put you on the glide path forward and not help you recognize opportunities that might exist in the marketplace.

Given the realities of innovation and the speed of change, how do organizations counter those challenges?  How do they become more effectively innovative?

How to be more effective in innovation.  I think that’s another great topic.  There are a couple of things that organizations can do.

First, I think you can make innovation better by making the unfamiliar familiar.  What you need to do is help people make the cognitive transition from what they know to what’s unknown.  Let me give you a few examples here.

Edison, when he developed the electric light, he did a couple of things that helped people make the transition to this new technology.  First, he kept the same wattage as the gas lights so even though electricity could have created a lot brighter room, Edison kept the same wattage.  This helped people tie back to what was familiar and known to them.  Edison did a couple of other things.  He kept lampshades.  A lot of people don’t think about this, but why do we actually have lampshades?  Lampshades are just really a historical artifact.  They were originally put on to prevent the wind from blowing out the gas lamps, but you really didn’t need them when you had electric lights.  Edison kept them because it was familiar and known to people.

If we fast forward many decades, you see that savvy innovators are continuing to help make the unfamiliar familiar.  Think about computers.  When you boot up your computer, the thing that you’re staring at is called a desktop.  It’s really not a desktop in the physical sense, but what it is doing is helping people transition to what is done in a virtual world to what’s familiar to them in their real world.  This is basically doing the equivalent of what a desktop would do in the real world.  You’ve got your trashcan.  You’ve got your files in there.  It helps people see how this might operate in this new environment.

Think about e-commerce.  When Amazon.com came on the scene for e-commerce this was a new category.  People were unfamiliar with how this thing was going to operate.  Amazon did a couple of things to help people make that transition from the known to the unknown.  When you shop on Amazon.com where do you put things?  You put them into what’s called a shopping cart.  Again, not a term that was chosen lightly.  It was deliberately selected to help people make that transition from the known to the unknown.  When you’re done with all of your shopping, what do you do?  You check out.  Here Amazon is trying to help people understand that we do things in the virtual world very much like we would do them in the online world.  Making the unfamiliar familiar I think is a very important thing to facilitate innovation.

Another idea is to think about how to make things simpler and more accessible.  In most industries, there’s often a core dimension that customers care about.  When you’re innovating, you want to think about how you can compete, not by being better on that core dimension, but by being different.  That often requires being simpler and more accessible.  Let me give you an example.  If you think about the video game industry.  What might that core dimension that customers care about be?  It’s probably graphics quality.  If you look at the PlayStation 3, the images and the graphics are just stunning. This is what hardcore gamers really care about.  Now you have the Wii that comes onto the scene.  If you look at the graphics of the Wii, it actually sort of reminds me of my Atari 2600 days.  The graphics are fairly juvenile.  On that core dimension, it’s vastly inferior, but notice that Wii is not trying to compete by being better on that core dimension that people care about like graphic quality.  They’re trying to compete by being different, by being simpler and more accessible.  They deliberately went after this nongaming segment that Sony or Microsoft wouldn’t even have dreamed of going after.  In doing so, they opened up this huge new market for themselves.  Notice that Nintendo was not trying to compete by being better, but by being simpler and more accessible.

Another example of this is the CVS MinuteClinic.  If you think about medical care, one of the things customers traditionally want is a full suite of medical services, which is what most hospitals provide.  Here, CVS MinuteClinic is trying to innovate by being simpler and more accessible.  CVS MinuteClinic is not going to give you all the services, but will give you the ones that people really demand like checkups and shots and vaccinations and simple procedures.  Not everything, but the ones that are in most demand.  So, that’s a second idea – think simplicity and accessibility.

A third way to improve innovation is to pace it.  What often happens to an organization is that they only change when the market forces them to change.  What I often see in more successful organizations is an internal rhythm driving change.  Two quick examples here. One is Intel.  People are often familiar with Intel’s pacing rule to come out with a new chip every 18 months. Pixar, which seems to knock every movie they make out of the park, also has a pacing rule, which is to come up with a full-length feature film every 18 months.  They’re not waiting for the market to tell them to change.  They actually have an internal rhythm that keeps all of their employees in sync and keeps them moving forward in a coordinated manner.  Pacing innovation is a third one.

Adding diversity to the organization is a fourth idea that I think is important to juice innovation.  You can think about diversity in a couple of different ways.  First, you can think about diversity of teams.  Adding more functional backgrounds to teams, adding a diverse set of ages. This increased diversity creates task conflict, which helps surface better ideas in an organization.

Speaking of ideas, another important part about diversity is increasing the number of ideas.  If you look at IDEO which is probably the premier product design company in the world, they’ve helped create everything from the toothbrushes we use to the original iPod to space shuttles and that giant mechanical Free Willy whale.  They often rely on brainstorming.  It’s not uncommon in a 60-minute brainstorming session at IDEO for their individuals to come up with 100 ideas.  Let me tell you why the sheer number of diverse ideas is important. If you just have a few ideas, then what happens is that ideas become very personal.  It’s my idea versus yours.  What happens is when you can crank out more and more ideas and have more diverse ideas, it depersonalizes the selection process so that people can be more objective and select the idea that’s going to be most beneficial for the organization.  Adding diversity is the fourth one.

Maybe the last one that I’ll mention is, and it seems kind of obvious, but it’s actually quite important, is that you really need to understand fundamental needs.  Dig deeper to understand fundamental needs.  Let me just give you a recent example of this.  There were some colleagues of mine at Harvard that were asked to help McDonald’s become more innovative with regards to its shakes.  What these researchers did was quite interesting.  They went in and basically stationed themselves at the entrances and exits at a number of different McDonald’s to just get a sense of who this prototypical drinker of a shake might be.  If you were to guess who these people might be you might guess families or youth coming in the afternoons for a treat.  In contrast, what the researchers found was that a lot of these shake buyers were coming in early in the morning.  They were working professionals and they were buying them for breakfast.  That was surprising to these researchers so they started asking these consumers why they were buying shakes and what was their situation.

They found that there was a common theme – most of these buyers had a very long commute to work.  If you take that information, what might be the need?  Well, they had a long commute to work.  Essentially there is some boredom in their car and they kind of need something for that cup holder.  With that information, what could you do if you’re McDonald’s to be more innovative?  You might make the shake more viscous.  Right?  You might make it thicker so it doesn’t come up in the straw for about 10 minutes into the ride so it’s going to last the whole trip.  You might put some fruit in it to make it healthier if you’re consuming it for breakfast.  You might put the shake dispenser on the other side of the counter so people can get in or get out.  Realize that if you hadn’t understood these needs of these consumers, you probably would have just made a bigger shake or added a new flavor but you would have missed a lot these great insights.

The point on that exercise is that people hire a product to fill a need.  People hire a product to fill a need and you really have to understand that need.  If you understand that need, you’ll be able to innovate more effectively.  Those are a couple of things that help organizations improve innovation.

One thing you  shared there is McDonald’s recognizes they needed some new ideas and they brought an outside team in to help them innovate.  Are there any changes organizations can make so that they can start embracing these five areas you identified to help improve innovation internally?

Yes.  Your point about the outsiders is a good one.  I think it often helps to bring an outsider in.  Think about Wal-Mart and amazon.com.  We know that Wal-Mart is the largest discount retailer in the world, but if you look at the online space, they’re getting clobbered by Amazon.  Wal-Mart wants to essentially take over Amazon’s space.  What they’ve done is they said, “Let’s try and move away from our Bentonville culture.  Let’s establish a satellite office in Silicon Valley and let’s try to create a more innovative culture.”  They did something which was important, which is they created a small satellite office.  The challenge that they had was that they stacked the office with many Bentonville executives.  While they did one step correctly which I think is moving slightly away from the corporate headquarters, they are essentially just going to infuse it with the same blood by having Bentonville executives in charge of this online division.  I think having outsiders is critically important to sort of move away from the dominant paradigms and models and policies and procedures that organizations have had.  I think you see that in a lot of organizations.  When Toyota came up with its Prius automobile, it did not take the top engineers within the firm.  It actually pulled a younger executive from a completely different division that had almost no experience in this area and put him in charge for the very reason that they did not want him to be biased by experiences of the past.

Interesting.  Could you kind of take from that that organizations that are committed to innovation are changing peoples’ roles and the teams they’re working with to try to spark new interactions and new ideas?

Yes.  I think that might be a good way to think about it.  What you often see, too, in organizations is rotations.  Nokia was famous for shifting their executives around the organization.  I think they weren’t in one place longer than about two years before they were being rotated to new divisions.  I think that really facilitates the cross fertilization of ideas.  I think that’s another good thing.  I think the more times that you’re interacting with other teams in your organization and frankly other organizations outside of your own, you’re able to see and borrow best practices.

I’ve been doing some work on business accelerators, which are three-month intensive entrepreneurship programs.  These accelerators bring in cohorts or groups of firms that start together and they work through this three-month process.  What’s interesting is that when you are in an accelerator with a cohort, what often emerges is what one informant described as pacers.  When you think about a running race, there’s often a pacer that sets the speed and helps everybody pick up their momentum.  What happens is when you’re in this group of multiple firms, different pacers emerge in different areas.  You might have a product development pacer, someone that’s an expert in product development.  You might have a fundraising pacer that’s expert in fundraising.  You might have a web designer, a coding expert.  What happens is the more you interact with teams inside and outside your organization is you find these multiple pacers that can help you speed your own learning so that you don’t have to experience everything through trial and error.

Do you have any closing thoughts that you’d like to leave everyone with?

Overall, a key counterintuitive insight is that when markets become very fast paced and rapid and complex and require more innovation (which is what we’re seeing across many different industries), often the best strategies are the most simple. High performing organizations often rely on simple rules to facilitate innovation.  Cisco, which was known for creating a lot of growth through acquisitions often relied on a very simple acquisition rule.  It’s called the 75-75 rule:  acquire firms with less than 75 employees, 75 percent of which have to be engineers.  You see that in a lot of innovative organizations.  Organizations are cutting back rather than adding to structure.  By having some, but not too much structure, you can benefit from the past but also improvise in the present.  That’s a counterintuitive insight.  Again, when markets become very complex and fast paced, often the best strategies are the most simple.

By Stan Ahalt, director of the Renaissance Computing Institue (RENCI) and Kip Kelly, director of UNC Executive Development

Big data—the massive amounts of information companies collect through web crawlers, social media feeds, server logs, customer service databases, and other sources—is quickly becoming big business in today’s competitive marketplace, and if business leaders haven’t added big data to their strategic agendas yet, they will be compelled to in the near future. Few organizations, however, have the talent with the expertise needed to collect, organize, and analyze the data and to provide meaningful insights. Even fewer organizations have business leaders with the knowledge and experience needed to create value from big data.  HR and talent management professionals should understand how big data will affect their organizations and should be thinking about how best to build big data talent in their organizations.

Big data is transforming every industry as companies realize the opportunities they have to leverage big data analytics in marketing, sales, and operations. Google, for example, uses big data analytics to identify flu outbreaks in the United States in real time—a feat that takes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) about two weeks to do because it relies on slower reporting mechanisms. Google can identify the outbreaks faster because it receives more than three billion search queries on a daily basis and saves them all. Through big data analytics, Google was able to identify 45 search terms that, when used in a mathematical model, showed a strong correlation between their predictions and the CDC’s figures.

Target Corporation is another example of an organization leading the way in leveraging big data. Target wanted to identify customers who might be pregnant so they could gain their shopping loyalties well before the child’s birth. They examined the items couples tended to buy prior to pregnancy, like vitamins, unscented lotion, hand towels, etc., and through mathematical machinations, determined the likelihood that each couple was pregnant. By marketing to these couples well before their child’s birth, Target is able to capture a high-volume buying demographic.

As the demand for big data grows, so does the demand for the talent necessary to make sense of it. Unfortunately, there is simply a lack of people who have big data analytic skills, and this will lead to a severe talent shortage. HR managers and talent development professionals must understand the knowledge, skills, and abilities big data analysts need, and they must take steps to ensure their organizations have the talent to take advantage of the big data revolution.

Big data analysts must have skills similar to their IT predecessors— they must have a solid computer science background that includes knowledge of applications, modeling, statistics, analytics, and math—but they also need business savvy and the ability to communicate their findings to business and IT leaders in meaningful ways, skills not typically featured on IT job descriptions.

Businesses need more than big data analysts, however. Managers at all levels will have to develop new knowledge, skills, and experience to be effective. As Jeanne Harris, senior executive research fellow for Accenture Institute for High Performance, wrote in a blog for Harvard Business Review, managers must become more adept at mathematical reasoning and will need to understand how to use statistical models, how to interpret data, metrics, and the results of statistical models. They must also have the ability to look beyond their functional areas and see the big picture so they can tell the story the data reveals.

It is this combination of business acumen, knowing the right questions to ask, and deep technical knowledge that is confounding most organizations when it comes to finding big data talent.

You won’t find big data talent coming from colleges and universities because big data majors are few and far between. Some organizations are developing employees from within by offering to pay for big data training and development. Other organizations, like IBM and SAS, have partnered with universities to develop big data programs. Still others are thinking outside the box in their recruitment efforts and are recruiting talent from fields not typically identified with big data analytics, such as R&D, finance, physics, biology, and medicine.                

As demand for big data talent grows, competition for talent will become more aggressive and more expensive. HR and talent management professionals must act now to educate themselves, managers, and senior leaders about big data and its implication on their organizations; develop creative strategies to recruit and retain big data talent; and offer solutions to build big data talent in their organizations.

Atul Nerkar is associate dean of UNC Kenan-Flagler’s Executive MBA programs. He is also professor of strategy and entrepreneurship. Below, read his Insight into Innovation, the third in a five-part servies. Previous posts touched on the importance of failing fast and often and detailed why organizations must innovate.

Why is it important for an organization to master innovation?

We live in a world in which innovation is the buzzword. Everywhere you look, innovation is a buzzword. Why is innovation important? Most will come up with an answer like, “It’s important for competitor advantage,” or “We get stale, we get inert,” or “It’s good for society.” All those reasons are valid.

I think the most important reason why innovation is important is because it’s connected to what I call “profits” and “value creation” –  profits for private sector of nations and value creation for “not for profits”. I want to make a fairly controversial comment here. In general, for what I call “private companies,” these companies, generally, they’re looking for profits. There’s only one way to make money… in the market where there is demand for your products and so on, there’s one way to make money, and that’s to be a monopoly. However, there are two ways to being a monopoly.

One way to being a monopoly is to control scarce resources like oil or gas or gold. One of the advantages of having scarce resources is that you can drive up the prices and make money. These sorts of monopolies tend to die out over time. If you are a monopoly which lives on a scarce resource, you’re going to soon die out or your profit structure’s going to collapse.

The second way to being a monopoly is actually by being innovative. If you say “innovative,” by definition you are going to be first in some market or in a process or a product. If you are first in a market, product or process, and that process, product or market is value-creating, you are, by definition, a monopoly. If you are a monopoly, then you can actually charge a lot more and people actually buy it because they can’t get it anywhere else. You are doing it out of your own ability. Really, it’s sort of a correct thing.

I think innovation is at the heart of most companies and individuals because it can create value, and value can gather profits or societal value. That’s why innovation’s important.

Can you explain how an organization can look at their R&D process if they’re trying to create a monopoly around some type of innovation? If they have that mindset, how does that change how an R&D team mixes in with that opportunity?

At the heart of innovation is uncertainty. If you are going to be managing uncertain processes, then you need to be able to ensure that your risk-reward ratios are appropriate. Maybe a company that actually believes that they, by spending more on R&D, are going to be able to guarantee more in terms of innovations, and, therefore, more in profits, but that doesn’t work out necessarily. It’s not just about throwing money at R&D. It’s about how well you manage that portfolio of R&D.

Some of the most successful companies have been able to get more out of R&D are not the ones that are putting it all into one bucket or creating mega-projects. (There are times when you want to create mega-projects and so on.) These are the companies, where I actually know that value creation happens, through portfolio management of these resources. Where do you invest to give you long-term return? How does one put the portfolio together? Those are some of the issues that I look at in my research. It’s about ensuring that you do not put all your eggs in one basket. Invest in projects and cut loose if you think that you know there are going to be losses.

An important aspect of not having to put all your eggs in one basket is the size of your organization. At what point should an organization stop being focused on its one innovative success, and when should it start diversifying its portfolio and focus on various collections of product innovations?

I think the answer to this is, again, context-specific. In some industries, you have a pace of change that is very rapid. For example, in the technologies or World Wide Web space or the apps space in the case of tablets, you had to be innovating literally every month, every minute. Whatever you do is going to get obsolete very quickly. If you’re a startup, it doesn’t matter.  If you’re Microsoft, it doesn’t matter.  You still have to innovate.

Microsoft just launched its new tablet. In the history of Microsoft, they’d never done a physical product ever before. They’re doing it now because they believe that they have to. Going back to your question, “Is there a right time to become innovative?”…No, I think you need to be continuously innovative all the time, because the day you put out the innovation, the next day that innovation can become obsolete. Someone else is going to pick it up and imitate it.

To go back in the 1970s, this is a sector where people said that, “You know we will be running out of gas by the year 2000. There’ll be world-wide crisis and so on.” We have not had world-wide crisis in this context because of process innovations, huge process improvements and process efficiencies which have come about in the energy sector. Those have driven alot of value creation in society.

Do organizations always have this drive towards innovation or is this something that you can start getting the team to think about and transition towards: “We need to become innovative to survive?”

In fact, the normal state of organizations/all human beings is just to be inert. We like to settle into our comfort zone and not change. All innovation requires change, but not all change requires innovation. Alot of people think, “I’m changing” but are you changing in a manner which is going to create value for the organization?

I think the default status is not to be innovative for most organizations. I think you need to create the drive. You need to create the urge to be innovative in organizations. That’s one of the primary reasons why this is still a very hard topic and will remain a hard topic forever.

You may have an advantage given that your education is split between two countries and two cultures. Do you see innovation being approached the same way cross-culturally? Do some countries just have a more innovative drive programmed into them?

 No, here’s something which I do want to distinguish between. I think there is one concept which is what I call “innovation” and there is another which I will call “entrepreneurship”. I think it’s important to make that distinction. There are a large number of companies and countries, which could be innovative, but not necessarily entrepreneurial. “Entrepreneurial” means “being able to make that next leap and commercialize it or bring that value to the organization or society.”

My favorite example is always Steve Jobs. Alot of people believe that he was innovative. To some extent yes, of course, he was innovative, but he was largely entrepreneurial. He picked up innovation from all over. It didn’t matter if this was inside Apple or outside Apple.

Going back to your question about societies, I think the innovative potential is pretty much the same across … It’s not that some societies are more blessed with those skills. What they do with those skills is more important. I think that’s what I call “the entrepreneurial bent-of-mind”. Some of the Asian societies might be innovative, but they don’t know what to do with those innovations sometimes. The United States of America, for example, is far more entrepreneurial. A large number of companies are started around innovations, because individuals here want to take those innovations and commercialize them, while in many parts of the world, you will not see that happen. 

One of the things I always tell people is, “If you look at some of the biggest brand names, some of the products and so on they have have been commercialized in the United States, though they may be manufactured somewhere else.  The technology behind it, which is basically how you make those things, can happen anywhere in the world. How you commercialize it generally happens in the US.” There are societies which are better at entrepreneurship and some which are not as good. Again, those reasons go back to institutional structures, training, education and so on.

I think I always talk about these three things: technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship. I ask people, “What would you like to be? Would you like to be a technology person who is basically everyday going and punching in a tower and doing something routine? Do you want to be the person who goes out and does something different every day? Do you want to be the person who not only does the technology but also does the innovation and also makes money on it?” Now the answer is, of course, obvious. People say, “I want to make money, and I want to create value.”

I think part of it is that, if you want innovations to be value-creating for society and  for the firm that you own/work for, then you really want to be entrepreneurially innovative. I also think you have the source innovation not just within the organization. You have the source innovation from anywhere in the world. I think a large number of organizations get into this “not-invented-here syndrome” where they say, “If I didn’t invent it, I don’t want to do it.”

The best entrepreneurs or entrepreneurial-innovators are the ones who don’t care where the innovation happens. They want to bring it to life. One last part I would say is that, “How can you make these things come to life?” Our program is built on the fact that we want to create value for organizations and society.

Video games—and the people who play them—have changed dramatically since 1948, the year the first video game was patented. Generations of gamers have grown up and entered the workplace, and video games have made the same transition, extending their influence into companies around the globe. Many organizations are increasingly using gaming technology in their learning and development (L&D) programs to help build the next generation of business leaders.

As video games grow in popularity and sophistication, more organizations and government agencies are embracing them to support L&D efforts. A recent ESA study found that 70 percent of major U.S. employers use interactive software and games for L&D purposes, and nearly eight out of 10 U.S. employers plan on doing so in 2013.

Video games can be broken down into three categories: casual games, advergames, and serious games.

Casual games are for entertainment purposes only and can include everything from the solitaire game that comes pre-loaded on most computers to complex, multi- player games like Uncharted, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, and Battlefield 3. Although learning can occur when playing casual games, it is not the intended outcome.

Advergames advertise a product, organization or cause. They can be fun, but again, learning is not an intended or designed outcome.

Serious games are designed to improve learning and to result in measurable, sustained changes in performance or behavior. Serious games have been used in emergency services training, military training, and health care settings. They allow players to apply what they have learned in an L&D experience in a safe, simulated environment. For example, health care professionals can practice a new medical procedure using a serious sim game before trying it in the workplace. There is also evidence that serious games can develop soft skills like emotional intelligence, communication management, and critical problem solving and collaboration skills.

Serious games are increasingly being used by large U.S. employers to recruit, improve communication among managers and their staffs, and to train employees and new hires at all levels in their organizations. IBM, Farmers Insurance, the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Army, Nortel, Cold Stone Creamery, McKinsey & Co., SAS Institute, and Digital Equipment are just a few organizations using serious games in their workplaces.

Serious games can also be a valuable information source for employers. Serious games can yield insights that organizations can use to assess performance, identify patterns, and predict behaviors in situations that may occur in the real world. Senior leaders can use these insights to gain a better understanding of individual and organizational capabilities, to identify potential talent gaps and to help organizations become more innovative. Organizations are using serious games to tap into the knowledge and experience of the entire organization, and in some cases, beyond the organization to “crowd-source” new ideas.

Video games have been around for years, growing in popularity and sophistication. Most of today’s workers grew up playing these games, so it comes as no surprise that organizations have started to use gaming technology in new and exciting ways–including talent development. Well-crafted serious games are used to develop and reinforce skills and competencies. They can be used to safely practice tasks that require rapid and accurate responses, but their potential applications are much broader. Serious games can closely approximate actual working environments, while allowing players an opportunity to safely take risks, develop teamwork skills, creatively problem solve and collaborate, and to experiment and innovate.

Jayashankar Swaminathan, UNC Kenan-Flagler faculty director of the UNC Center for International Business Education and Research, has outlined three factors companies should consider before expanding their supply chains to India, Turkey or any other emerging economy.

1. Infrastructure Challenges

When operating a supply chain in an emerging market, many of the things taken for granted in developed countries are often unavailable. Infrastructure challenges can manifest themselves in many different ways, from un-air-conditioned warehouses to roads without drainage systems that shut down for days after each rainstorm. Even where paved roads exist, cities in emerging markets are developing at a much faster rate than infrastructure can keep up, and traffic congestion can render highways impassable. These challenges mean that companies need to build flexibility into their business plans. Production and distribution rarely follow precise timelines. Where a late delivery might mean a 40-minute delay in a developed country, it could mean weeks in an emerging market.

Energy shortages and power supplies that suffer frequent interruptions are another major infrastructure problem in developing countries. Companies may need to invest in back-up power supplies that keep offices running even when they’re off the grid. In addition, they can address poor infrastructure by finding innovative ways to use technology. For example, rapid SMS technology can be used to track shipments when internet access is unavailable.

 2. Challenges Adapting to New Consumer Preferences

The middle class in emerging markets is simply not the same as in developed markets. Perhaps the biggest difference is consumers’ emphasis on value and bargain hunting in emerging markets. Companies cannot expect to just enter a new market with the same product they sell in developed countries at a similar price point. Instead, they must innovate to meet the needs of these value-driven consumers, all while keeping unique regional tastes and preferences in mind.

For example, when Unilever entered the Indian market with containers of shampoo that were the standard size in Western countries, the company found that its products were only appealing to the top 25% of India’s middle class. Unilever discovered that consumer products like shampoo are frequently sold in small sachets in India and began offering new units that only hold enough shampoo for one or two uses. However, these units also had to be priced at a much lower price level of around four cents. In order to make a profit, Unilever had to revamp its supply chain with strategies such as developing smaller factories and outsourcing more units.

 3. Distribution Challenges

Particularly for consumer products, distribution is dominated by small mom-and-pop stores. In India these stores make up 95% of the retail market, and this percentage is similar throughout the developing world. With total areas of about 150 square feet, both their display and storage space is extremely limited. Unlike the developed world, which is characterized by large, organized retailers like Wal-Mart, these stores lack the ability to provide consumers with a large stock or variety of products. For example, a retailer may only be able to have three or four tubes of toothpaste in the store at one time. This means companies will often need to provide incentives for stocking their products and have sales staff on the ground in local provinces to help build relationships with store-owners.

Stutts, who focuses on BCG’s consumer, marketing and sales practice areas, shared his experience working on a project with a top hotel company in his presentation, “Getting Out of the Arms Race: Branding a Loyalty Program.”

While branding has traditionally been ruled by emotion and “what feels right,” Stutts says that consulting in this area is beginning to take a much more data- driven approach. “What used to be marketers sitting in a room, squeezing toys, throwing out ideas and brainstorming has now become a very quantitative process that we really pioneered,” said Stutts. “We do an extremely quantitative version of branding at BCG.”

Stutts and his team were tasked with finding a way to build a long-term strategic advantage with the hotel company’s loyalty program. At the beginning of the project, the company was locked in an “arm’s race” with competitors who all offered the same basic rewards, such as free nights or free breakfasts. It appeared to managers that the only way to differentiate a program would be to offer more benefits and freebies, but this escalation in rewards could only go on so long before it would negatively affect profits.

When the BCG team was called in, it realized that in order to set the client’s program apart from others, it would need to tap into consumers’ emotional connection with the loyalty program, something no competitor had ever tried before. “We knew we had to get to something beyond this arms race of more and more rewards,” said Stutts. “We had to get to something broader, longer term and more meaningful.”

With the help of extensive focus groups and surveys, Stutts identified why customers like loyalty programs on an emotional level, translated these emotions into concrete attributes and worked to incorporate these into the program. The research revealed six emotional spaces, which were subjected to further quantitative analysis to identify the best business opportunities.

Eventually, BCG determined that “scoring a good deal” and “hard work pays off” would be the most effective emotional appeals for the client. Stutts’ team then worked with a creative agency to turn its data into a branding campaign with a consistent look and feel across all touch points, from the program enrollment brochures to the website to advertisements. “Consumers went from a point where all they saw were points and miles to something like, ‘The whole point of all this travel is that I can share these moments with my family by using loyalty rewards.’”

But the research doesn’t end with strategy development. Stutts said the consulting field is becoming much more focused on implementation, rather than just identifying strategies. BCG carried about a market test of its recommendations in 40 hotels across the country, and the results were impressive. The new branding strategy has more than doubled program enrollment, and Stutts credits solid research and data analysis with its success.

For aspiring consultants, he emphasized the importance of being familiar with the industry’s leading statistical analysis tools, such as SPSS. Students at UNC Kenan-Flagler are well-positioned to handle this shift toward big data. Several of the school’s courses, such as Marketing Analysis and Decision Making, use SPSS, Management by the Numbers and current case studies teach students how to use data analysis to guide and support marketing decisions.

“We want associates, consultants, MBAs and undergrads to really understand data and how to make the data talk,” said Stutts. “Big data is what it’s all about now.”

Arvind Malhotra is UNC Kenan-Flagler’s T. W. Lewis Scholar and Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship. Below, read his insight into innovation, the second in a five-part series with UNC Kenan-Flagler professors.

Why is it important for an organization to master innovation?

In many ways that’s what kept most organizations going into pattern differentiation.  Innovation is a good buzz word, but to me it’s also about saying, “How can you sustainably differentiate yourself in the marketplace?”  with sustainably meaning over time having an edge over your competition and being seen as superior to your competition.  It’s really critical because it’s not a one shot game.  It’s over and over and over and over again trumping your competition.  That is the only way to go in any economy for that matter

Given that this is the key to sustainably growing and succeeding in your business, why do you think so many organizations find innovation, or sustainable differentiation, so hard?

 It’s the inertia of suppressed, that’s one of the major points here.  Once you get good at doing something, the tendency is to do more of that, and you get into the rut of doing it slightly better, building a better mousetrap.  Organizations have two things to do.  One is exploitation, and the other is exploration.  Exploration always has rewards that are not instantaneous.  There is no instant gratification from doing exploration.  In that regard, exploitation is very quarter-to-quarter driven.  You do what you’ve been doing better and you keep capitalizing on what you do really well especially when you’re doing something well. 

We’ll use this saying, which I think is the bane of all organizations, “Why fix it when it ain’t broke?”  Most of the companies that actually are innovators prepare for when things are broke, and that’s hard.  When you’re doing something very well, the tendency and the gravity of success pull you back into doing more of it.  You spend more money on doing what you do very well, and you spend less money on something you really don’t do well.  It’s human nature which channels a lot of organizational behavior, and that is the gravitational pull that’s very hard for organizations to keep away from. 

It’s also hard to innovate because you’re going to do things differently, and those who have been doing very well will look at you differently and treat you differently – and you’re almost a pariah in many ways.  You’re the maverick, and you have to overcome that tendency too.  Because people were doing very well, their successful business lines will demand more money based on the projection of history which says, “Well, we’ve been doing well.  We are the cash cow, so invest more in us.”  Overcoming this mindset is always a challenge for most organizations.

The need to innovate isn’t new given that it’s the very nature of how businesses succeed, but with new technologies and new approaches to doing business, have you been finding there are innovative ways to approach innovation?

I think your question is a very good one.  There’s product and service innovation which is based on one aspect of the organization, and then there’s the business model innovation which is changing the whole game entirely   There are cutting edge companies, such as Amazon, which are not about building better bookstores, but are about actually capturing the wallet share and the mind share of the customer over the long term and changing the way in which objects are perceived in the marketplace.  It could be any object.  It doesn’t have to be a book.

There are subtle shades of innovation, and there is the offering-by-offering innovation.  And then there’s changing the whole way in which you do business which translates to new services, a new way of looking at things and looking very differently in the marketplace from what’s come before.   You would have never thought in the 90’s that Apple would be a company that distributes music and movies.  You’ve asked an important question of how can we engage a business model innovation which changes the model of doing business in the marketplace entirely.  It’s not about one product.  It’s not about a new blockbuster product, it’s about a completely different way of looking at a company.

Do you have any examples or any steps that are helpful for an organization that wants to approach changing the way it approaches its business and innovate?

I understand your question as “What is a very good approach to being a business model innovator?”   To me, the underlying philosophy of these innovative companies is that they experiment and again the cliché, but very true, “Fail fast, fail often and learn from failure and embrace failure.”  It’s a risk to seek failure.  It’s a risk-seeking behavior, but not one of investing money and hoping for a blockbuster change.  Most business innovations come from a series of small experiments that are successful and others that are unsuccessful.  I think the central pieces to this are: how well you experiment, how you create your experiments and how you learn from them.  It’s not about taking a big risk and failing.  It’s about taking swings of risks and managing every experiment as a portfolio. 

We’re good at managing a lot of portfolios, but not as good at  managing portfolios of experiments… of thinking of experiments as small investments just like venture capitalists would.  Venture capitalist treat  different companies in exploration as set-up experiments in their portfolio and realize that 70% of them will fail, but that they will learn from them and have enough diversified bets to ensure successes are part of the failures. 

Companies like Amazon, Google and Apple have a lot of small experiments and the capacity for alot of small failures and the capacity to fail fast and move on to the next thing.  Google is the persona of that, with a series of things in their Google labs out of which 80% to 90% would fail, but these failures are treated as learning opportunities.  It’s important to have a lot of experiments, to learn from them, and to learn to absolve failure and embrace it so that it’s not something to be hidden under the carpet.  It’s important for the experiments to be transparent and that the learning from any failures be made equally transparent.  3M does this very well and is not a sexy tech company, but is very innovative and does produce a lot of technology over time and has done very well at undertaking a series of experiments. 

The second aspect of this is to be open, realizing that not all ideas will come from the domain of what’s dimensional R&D.  Be open to ideas from outside – learning from other companies, learning from customers, learning from suppliers.  The more you let your system be open to learning from outside, the more you will learn from experiments having been done by others in their ecosystems.

I imagine if you’ve got a large organization that hasn’t embraced this culture of failing fast and failing often, a number of things need to change – from leadership to how people feel about their job security and reputation. Do you have any quick examples of a firm that wasn’t known for innovation, but went through this transition process to make sure that they could be more competitive in the future?

There is a very big blue firm that’s a classic example of a very stodgy old firm with blue suits called IBM, and within a decade, our friend became very successful again by diversifying itself a series of things simultaneously, rethinking itself as less of a product and more of a service company, and undertaking a diversified set of business lines.  And when they failed with one, they nixed it and then they continued with others.  IBM’s a very good example of a complete cultural change.  The company that went from, “We are the scientists.  We do what we do the best.  Who else would know how to do anything better?  We are going to make very big bets, and we’re going to sell out everything on one big bet” to a company that’s now so diversified in the technology, rethinking itself as a service company and also getting open and trying to get collaborations going from outside the company.  IBM learned very fast that sustainability was good.  It would be an important issue transforming itself into thinking for a smarter planet rather than thinking of just a product or just a service.  To me, that’s a classic example of how you can change your company culture.  It doesn’t happen overnight.  It’s a sustained clear path of transformation.

 Any closing thoughts on innovation?

I think I’d like to readdress the philosophy of experimentation.  I think the trick is to learn to do a lot of experiments and to not expend a lot of cost.  It’s even better if you could get others to do experiments for you and then learn from those and take the learning and build something on it.  It’s about treating a lot of innovation as nothing but good old experimentation done well, and thinking of experiments as low bet portfolios.  It’s about betting on a lot of things simultaneously or bookending a lot of things simultaneously and then dropping those that don’t work and going with those that do work.  What’s significant for most companies is the fact that they look at success as just one giant success.  Instead, success can be found in the sequence of a series of failures.  Just finding the adoptive capacity to try to learn from those areas of failure is really critical. 

Home to one of the oldest civilizations, India’s history has been shaped by Britain’s colonial rule and its ongoing conflict with Pakistan, which has resulted in three wars since India gained its independence in 1947. Although one of the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) countries and one of the world’s fastest growing emerging markets, India still bears remnants of Britain’s legacy when it comes to business.

With a political system similar to that found in Britain, India’s parliament is divided into an upper and lower house with the lower house holding control over monetary decisions so that the Indian people have a greater say in the nation’s financial future. However, politics in India are much more corrupt than in Europe, with much bureaucratic red tape and assassinations not uncommon. Additionally, India is the second most populous country in the world, and it is predicted that the country will be home to more than 1.5 billion people by the year 2030.

Religion plays a key role in not only the personal lives of many Indians, but it also has an impact on the country’s business values. More than 80 percent of the country is Hindu, with significantly smaller populations of Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists. When it comes to the meaning of work, Hindus believe that work is a divine duty, and do not correlate reward to work in any way. This perspective results in much greater risk taking in the realm of business, because Hindus believe that any outcome is dependent on destiny or God’s will. Furthermore, although the majority of Indians speak Hindi, all business in India is conducted in English.

Contributing to India’s recent success as an emerging world market is the diversity of its industries, with a strong presence in everything from village farming agriculture to information technology services. Agriculture occupies more than half of the nation’s workforce with the service sector represents more than half of the country’s economic output. Combined with the highly skilled and cheap labor provided by the work force, many of India’s industries are poised for foreign investment.

Three key market areas the presenters identified as open to opportunity were the automobile, retail and beer industries. In addition, outsourcing has become a major area of growth for India as the workforce has made the transition from simple task outsourcing like telemarketing and IT help to knowledge process outsourcing of more advanced tasks like accounting and legal advising.

However, even with such recent success, the business landscape in India still faces a number of challenges. Almost 30 percent of the country’s population falls below the poverty line, unemployment rates are near 10 percent and there is significant inequality in terms of literacy rates for men and women. Yet perhaps the greatest obstacle to efficient market growth in India is the nation’s lack of infrastructure.

With a poor road system that makes it difficult to get products to the market in time, almost 20 percent of produce is lost to poor storage facilities in the agriculture sector alone. The comprehensive rail system, a remnant of the British colonization, remains congested and in desperate need of repairs, and although India boasts 13 major ports, most water traffic is inefficiently routed through the Mumbai port, making transportation costs significantly higher than in other world markets.

Given these conditions and factors that have a critical impact on India’s industries, the presenters offer several suggestions for individuals considering entry into the country’s markets. When entering a meeting with Indian business people, proper etiquette dictates that the senior-most employees are greeted first, either with a handshake or Namaste. As Indians value trust above all else in business, building strong relationships with business partners is key to success. The presenters argue that a joint venture with Indian business partners offers the best market entry strategy.

Dr. Swaminathan closed the webinar session with the argument that although the country’s economy has slowed down a bit in the last couple of years, the dollar can go a long way in India. “Among the BRIC countries, India has the youngest population and they have a ‘can do’ attitude,” he says. “They have the aspirations for the next biggest innovations.”  

UNC Kenan-Flagler assistant professor Bradley Staats studies the onboarding process, the period of orientation and socialization that occurs during a new hire’s first few days on the job. During this time companies typically focus on skills training and building pride in the organization. However, Staats’ latest research has revealed that emphasizing self-expression and personal, rather than organizational, identities may create more beneficial outcomes for firms. Orientation programs with a more individualized approach result in lower turnover rates, greater job satisfaction and improved operational performance down the road.

“By following these four principles of personal identity socialization, companies can really reshape the onboarding process to be one that helps employees recognize and use their unique abilities from the very beginning,” said Staats, in a webinar presented by UNC Kenan-Flagler’s Center for International Business Education and Research. “The result is that employees bring more of themselves to work without additional financial rewards.”

1. Break Out of the Traditional Employment Trap

The typical mindset of an employer is just to pay employees at the market rate to complete tasks and do what they’re told. But this approach causes companies to miss out on the opportunity to really engage their employees, particularly those in Generation Y or “Generation Me.” Managers need to remember that their organizations are made up of people who have a natural desire to use their signature strengths and abilities. Particularly during orientation, they need to frame work differently; it’s about achieving personal fulfillment, not just collecting a paycheck.

2. Help Newcomers Identify Their Authentic Strengths

Before introducing newcomers to their fellow employees or even to the job, set aside some time in orientation to allow them to pinpoint and describe their individual strengths. Ask personalized questions, such as “what is unique about you that leads to your best performance and happiest times at work?” Encourage them to reflect on their past successes, put together a personal highlights reel and consider what made those accomplishments possible.

3. Ask Newcomers to Consider How Their Authentic Strengths can be Applied to the Job

Invite newcomers to brainstorm how they can incorporate their personal strengths and experiences into the new position. This simple exercise helps employees view the job as an opportunity to use their strengths, while integrating their own personal purpose and motivations into the job’s parameters.

4. Facilitate Introductions to Other Organizational Members

Structure introductions so that employees have the opportunity to present themselves in a way that emphasizes their individual strengths. Rather than asking obscure icebreaker questions, have newcomers share moments when they were at their best. By talking about their successes, new hires will have a chance to affirm themselves in a new setting and construct a social identity around their strengths.

Sridhar Balasubramanian – also known as “Dr. B.” – is associate dean of the MBA Program, the Roy & Alice H. Richards Bicentennial Distinguished Scholar and professor of marketing at UNC Kenan-Flagler. He is a widely published and cited researcher. Below, read his insight into innovation, the first in a five-part series with UNC Kenan-Flagler professors.

Why is it important for an organization to master innovation?
There are multiple reasons why it is important for organizations to master innovation.  First of all, the world is becoming increasingly competitive.  Fifty years back you only talked about competition from your local region.  Today, you produce a product, you try to patent it, but within about six months somebody … some company in Asia has produced something pretty close and they worked around your patents as well.  The only way to respond to a situation like that is to be relentlessly innovative.  Only companies that constantly challenge what they do, challenge themselves to come up with new and different ways of doing things, and also constantly improve on things that they already do will survive in this new globally competitive environment.  That’s very, very important. 

Customer expectations are also sky high.  Customers today have very little patience with products that are old.  If you think about baby boomers, they often think about a product as being around for, say, 30 years as tried and tested.  Whereas a Generation Y member thinks of such a product as simply being tired.  Innovation cycles are becoming rapidly shorter, which means that companies have to be constantly on their toes, turning out new products, new services, and often new solutions because customers today don’t just want a product or a service.  They want companies that solve their problems. 

All of this means that to thrive in today’s rapidly changing globally competitive environment, companies have no option but to be innovative.

You mention the challenge of organizations trying to innovate quickly and develop both new solutions and improve on their previous.  Do you have some examples of companies that we all might recognize that seem to have the process of doing that down pretty well?
Both Apple and Samsung, in the cell phone market, have been very good at innovating.  They innovate in somewhat different ways.  It’s interesting, if you think about Apple, they came up with the iPhone, and if you look at the design of the iPhone today and compare it with the original design, there are lots of similarities, but yet there’s been a lot of change.  In the middle of all that change they’ve managed to keep the identity, the soul of the product intact.

On the other hand if you think about companies like Samsung, they have scores of phones which are quite distinct on the market, and they approach innovation as “we’ll produce a phone for every type of customer and pretty much saturate the market with phones”.

Here are two companies that have adopted very different approaches to innovation, but each approach works in its own way.  Apple has the “let’s look at the product, let’s refine it, let’s make it more jewel like, let’s put in some more functionality but let’s keep the soul of the product the same.”  Whereas Samsung’s approach is “let’s do a lot of things in order to overwhelm the customer with choice.” 

Also the other kind of innovation that is really coming to the fore right now, especially with the economy not being on steroids at the moment, is there’s no what you call frugal innovation, innovation on a shoestring, so to say.  A good example of that actually comes from Asia – the Tata Nano.  Tata, which also, by the way, runs Jaguar and Land Rover which are luxury marquis brands today, came up with Tata Nano which was a car that sold for something like $2,500.  How did they do this?  You cannot build a car that sells for $2,500 by taking a car that sells for, say $10,000, and simply cheapening it.  You have to challenge everything that goes into the car.  You’ve got to design the car from the ground up.  They came up with a car that sold for $2,500 and made a bit of money.

A lot of ideas about how to do things simply, how to innovate on a shoestring, are now coming back to developed economies from developing economies, whereas historically the flow of innovation has always been from developed economies to developing economies.  This is a reverse innovation that’s also taking place right now.  A lot of interesting changes in the way companies are looking at innovation.

I’d also say that 15 years back, the thinking in organizations was often “Hey, I’m a doer.  I’m an executive.  Innovation is for those brainy cone heads located in the third floor corner office.”  That thinking has changed.  There’s been this big democratization of innovation where everybody can potentially be an innovative thinker.    To do that successfully, what you need to have are the tools and techniques and the comfort level with thinking innovatively.

From an academic viewpoint, one of the things that we always try to do is not just to give managers and students concepts related to innovation, but tangible tools and techniques that they can go ahead and apply to be innovative on an anytime, anywhere basis.

What are your thoughts on if there are advantages to one approach of innovation verses the other?
I think that both approaches work.  It’s a question of “How do you want to do this?”  With Apple, everything is simplified.  We have a simplified phone, there’s just one phone that they typically produce at any time.  They introduce one phone and then fade out the other models very quickly.  Samsung could produce 20 different phones at any point in time.  They’re just different models of doing business.  I would argue that there is no one best route to being innovative.  In fact, what a successful innovation is largely defined by certain context.  As the context changes, what is the innovation model that the firm must adopt?  That changes as well.  Successful innovation is often a question of matching what the company does inside, in terms of the innovation processes, and what is happening on the outside, in terms of how is the brand positioned, what are the market segments the company goes after, what is the degree of competition, etc.  I wouldn’t think that being locked into a narrow perspective and “this is the only thing that works” is the way to go.  I think that having some flexibility is very important. 

This also brings up another point, which is often the companies that find it the most difficult to change, to be innovative in response to the environment, and even in anticipation of changes in the environment are large, successful organizations because large successful organization are often prisoners of their history.  They build core competency, something that really makes them good at what they do.  But when such an organization is embedded in an environment that is globally competitive and rapidly changing, a core competency that empowers the organization today can very quickly become a core rigidity, something that fetters the organization tomorrow. 

Therefore it is particularly important for successful organizations to build, not just some core competencies which is what is it they’re good at and stick to them, it’s also important for them to build a business ability of strategic flexibility, which is the ability to be good at change, the ability to challenge their past, to challenge their core competencies and to ask “What is it that I should carry forward into the future, and what is it that I should leave behind?”  Then there are some new core competencies that enable them to intersect with the environment where it’s going.  That can often be difficult because it is often so difficult for companies to step away and to sometimes even renounce what has made them successful in the past.

What are some of the steps large organizations can begin taking to shift that culture and empower teams to think that way?
That’s a very good question, how do large organizations … and how does, for that matter, any organization build a culture of innovation and change?  Fundamentally, it comes down to three things.  The first is: Are people motivated to be innovative?  This is the old argument that you can take a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.  If people deep within their hearts don’t want to change, they don’t want to be innovative and nothing’s going to happen.  This is where leadership comes in.  Is the leader a champion for innovation?  Are they lighting the fire inside their people about the need to change, about the desire to change and are they getting the team rolling in that direction?

The second is: opportunity.  If managers spend the entire day fighting fires and thinking about next quarter’s results, they are not going to be innovative.  You have to create the time, the white board, and the room where people can get together and have the opportunity to think about change and to be innovative.  You’ve got to create it, otherwise innovation will not automatically happen.

The third is: ability.  Are the managers really champions of change?  They may create the time every Friday from 3:00 – 5:00 and say, “We’ll not talk about this quarter, we’ll talk about what new things we can do, and how we can do existing things differently.”  Then they all get together and they all want to change, but  they’re looking at each other and they’re thinking “How do we make this happen?”  That’s the ability part of it. 

There’s motivation (M), opportunity (O) and ability (A). 

The interesting thing is any one of these (M, O, A) can be a bottleneck on the other two.  You could be highly motivated.  You could create the time and the space, the opportunity, but if you don’t know how to be innovative, nothing’s going to happen.  Likewise, you could be highly motivated.  You could have the ability, but if you don’t create the time and the space to be innovative, nothing’s going to happen.  Finally, you could have the time and the space, you could know how to do it, but if you don’t really want to do it deep inside you, nothing’s going to happen.
It’s very important for organizations to step back and say, “Which of these are really blocking the innovation process, and how do we open up these bottlenecks and let innovation flow through the pipelines?”

Is the ability to be innovative something that can be taught or is that like motivation, where it comes from within?                                                                                                                                                                                                                That’s where relying on experts comes in because an expert can actually, in my opinion, teach people to be innovative.  We cover tools and techniques and frameworks that we share that managers can take from programs to work Monday morning and then start thinking differently by applying these tools and frameworks.  Absolutely.  People can learn to be innovative.