We often hear about the importance of pursuing innovation in order to achieve competitive advantage. But, is innovation a real priority for enterprise or is it just a buzzword? How actively do firms implement strategies and objectives that have innovation as their utmost priority and concern?

Speaking about innovation

Innovation refers to the process of innovating, that is making changes in something established through implementing a new method, an idea or a product. Innovation is the core driver of business competitiveness and productivity, yet many CEO’s and executives speak about innovation,  they throw the term around, yet they actually don’t encourage innovation within their organisation.

Employing Road-Blockers

Companies seem to employ ‘road-blockers’, which are those who do not seek to implement innovation. Is this really the employees fault though? Most companies do not foster innovation because their own stringent processes are holding them back.  They don’t deem it important enough to actively change their archaic processes and it’s likely they don’t reward for innovating thinking or implementing tools that saves the company time and money.

Most big companies operate within complex systems and having the skill-set to break through these systems can be a challenge to say the least. Particularly when employees have the mindset that it’s too hard to innovate. Although they may come across tools that will improve the efficiency and effectiveness of daily tasks, they don’t have the influence to change such complexity nor the drive to progress.

Incentivising Innovation

Do companies actually need different policies, procedures and incentives to encourage innovation? How about altering their hiring approach to ensure that new recruits particularly at an executive level, are receptive to embracing change and committed to continuous improvement. It seems a shame that companies are losing out to red tape and lack of internal innovation.

At the end of the day truly innovative companies are easy to work with and quick to implement change. Innovation is a priority for these companies however for the rest that are willing to sit on their hands and just talk, shouldn’t be allowed to speak the word innovation. For them, innovation is just a buzzword.