Owning innovation: are you up to the job?

The talent acquisition wish-list is clear. Innovative thinking is a key requirement of directors looking for senior management ready to embrace change and harness new ideas.

The strategic goal is to institutionalise innovation, make it integral to the organisation and thereby achieve long-term competitive advantage. But experience to date suggests ‘owning’ innovation is easier said than done.

Innovation lip-service is commonplace. Breaking with past practice is not.

Feedback from innovation insiders often highlights the mismatch between innovation advocacy and innovation reality.

‘Intrapreneurs’ hired to inject entrepreneurial thinking and innovative risk-taking into a business routinely complain of “innovation-naïve management” and “inflexible programmes and policies” or denounce window-dressing (wearing jeans instead of pin-stripes is permitted but lateral thinking isn’t).

Literature on business innovation is full of tips for wannabe innovators. For example:

This, however, is a to-do list rather than a strategy that will enable a business to ‘own’ innovation and build it into the organisational culture.

For this to happen, top management must be brave enough to commit to innovation as a major driver of performance. For a cultural shift to occur, business leaders must take responsibility for continual innovation.

From the top down, the message has to be communicated that everyone must be prepared to innovate.

Innovation is not a department or an initiative and it is certainly not locked away in the product development division.

For innovation to be embedded in the culture, it has to be encouraged throughout the organisation. Everyone in every department at every level must embrace their role as innovators. If they have new ideas they must share them.

Only senior management can build individual confidence and motivation like that. There’s a word for business leaders who can pull that off … they’re called true innovators.

*Annelize van Rensburg is a director of Talent Africa – member of Signium, a leading executive search and talent management company.

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