Why Innovation Loses

Innovation requires a deviation from familiar practices, which are vigilantly defended.  The guardians of the status quo have the benefit of the doubt: what has been done for years is easier to trust than something that has never done before.   There is no performance data to back an innovative suggestion, and a great deal of fear that making a change will bring about worse results than are currently being achieved.  So it is safer, easier, and more comfortable to engage in “strategic” planning that merely seeks to make efficiency improvements in the current operations.

Additionally, the planning process in many instances supports efficiency rather than innovation – there is simply no room on the agenda to discuss new items, nor any serious consideration.   Consider some of the following qualities of business plans:

1. They are operational rather than strategic.   An operation plan consists of following established practices and merely adjusting for capacity – just because a plan affects the enterprise does not make it strategic
2. Plans are too inflexible.  A plan is an inspirational statement about an uncertain future, and if it has no tolerance for change or adaptation, it is doomed to failure.  Inflexibility is seen as a way to mitigate risk – in effect, by making sure that nothing risky is planned.
3. Plans are unrealistic.  A plan based on past results is based on the premise that the future will be exactly the same as the past, which in the present day is almost never the case.   Stagnant industries will continue along the same trend lines, but if there is competitive innovation, patterns will shift dramatically.

It is also expressed that innovation cannot be planned – that it consists of wild ideas that arise unpredictably, out of the blue.   This is a valid characteristic of the first stage of innovation (brainstorming), but once an idea is struck upon, there is a longer and more laborious process of detailing and validating it that lends itself well to traditional planning processes.   Properly executed, innovation involves a deliberate process (identifying the problem, exploring alternatives, evaluating them, etc.).  It is only when it is misunderstood to imply a spontaneous and random process, without structure or a sense of direction, that it becomes unpredictable.

Finally, innovation is often relegated to tactical maneuvers: the strategic plan is based on efficiency and optimization of existing operations, and innovation is only done when the strategy hits a snag.   In fact, innovation is often a scapegoat for bad strategy: given insufficient resources to complete an assignment, a manager is told to “be innovative” in finding a solution to a problem that was created by bad planning.   This only serves to further discredit the concept of innovation in stagnant companies – which is likely exactly what the defenders of the status quo hope to do.