10 Biggest Innovation Challenges

From our experience, this is the list of the biggest Innovation challenges that organisations face.

Having a clear purpose for Innovation within your organisation

Organisations understand that they have to innovate to survive, yet they often don’t have a common understanding as to what Innovation means for them or what is their own purpose for innovation. Without this clarity, every member of your organisation will have a different understanding as to why you are innovating; without a common view you will not get consistent engagement across your business. There are, of course, standard meanings to Innovation, such as ‘the process of creating new ideas, methods, products, or services to solve problems and create value’, but does this really describe your understanding and purpose of innovation within your organisation?

We can help you clarify this purpose and meaning. We have worked in organisations to ascertain a common understanding of their purpose for Innovation, and once they have this at all levels then Innovation quickly becomes aligned behind a shared goal.

Rushing towards the solution and becoming wedded to it

This rush towards the solution is one of the biggest challenges faced within Innovation. The desire to solutioneer (solve the problem before it is well understood) not only leads to a poor solution, but once you have a solution you become wedded to it, making it difficult to let it go.

There are ways of mitigating this. We can help you create a process that ensures that time is spent exploring the problem, and also ensures that the people that understand the problem are part of the project team. This then turns solutioneering into a benefit as it becomes another way of exploring the problem.

Poor customer or colleague understanding

Presently most organisations research and understand their customers and colleagues as BAU. Yet there are still some out there who don’t even have clarity as to who their customers are, particularly within B2B2C organisations. The key to selling is understanding the value exchange, and to do this you have to understand how customers value your product or service. This has the added benefit of helping define your product development roadmap.

We have helped organisations understand who their customers are, and to build longitudinal research plans to help them understand how their products and services are used and how to improve them. This understanding then becomes the foundation for an Innovation roadmap.

Starting with the solution

There is no problem with starting with the solution as long as you recognise that to have a successful solution you not only need to deeply understand the solution, you also have to understand your users.

The usual approach is to understand the user's wants, needs, pain and gain points. Once you have these then you have a way of determining how to address and solve for these. You can then test these using probes and prototypes and end up with a tested solution. However, if you start with the solution, then you still have to do the work on understanding the user. However, the trap you will often fall into is that once you have a solution in mind it is very difficult to let it go.

Another challenge we see is where the innovation is technology-led. History is full of examples of this, where the user problem is actually created to fit the solution and not the other way around. For example, ‘John lands in a strange city and needs to find a hotel’. A great problem statement, but how many times have you flown somewhere but have not known where you are going or already have a hotel booked?

We can help you to avoid this through some simple tools and processes to ensure that the user sits at the heart of your Innovation.

Minimise risk, maximise confidence

Innovation is, by its nature, a risky business. The real art is to design your process to test the highest risk parts up front, so you know as quickly as possible if this approach will fail. This includes engaging users for testing as early as possible. This is what fail fast means. If you do this, then as you go through the journey, the risk reduces and the confidence builds.

We have designed processes that achieve this by establishing the key assumptions and testing these with real users as early as possible. The advantage of this is that, if handled properly, these users can also quickly become your champions.

Growing gap between problem and solution

Having a clear problem definition is an important part of Innovation, but there is a danger that as you start to develop a solution, its effectiveness to address the problem decreases. However, there is a simple way to address this, and that is to include problem experts within the project team.

We have outlined project teams for organisations that are composed of the problem experts alongside the solution experts (along with some Innovation expertise) to ensure that that solution is constantly tested against the problem which minimises this problem-solution gap.

Innovation resources and skill gaps

How do organisations ensure that they have the right skills and resources in-house to support Innovation? Unfortunately, there is no standard answer to this as it depends on the purpose and the nature of the Innovation that you want to do. If you want to innovate around products, then you need one set of skills. However, if you want to innovate around technology then the required skills may be different (though perhaps not the skills you think you need).

We have worked with organisations to determine both the nature and the purpose of their Innovation, and then have worked to create both the processes and the resources required to drive Innovation forward.

A lack of clear vision and strategy

This is a barrier to Innovation, but it doesn’t mean that Innovation is impossible without it. We have innovated successfully with organisations that are driven by purpose and not vision. In this case we built an Innovation process centred around key challenges that related to the organisations purpose, and solved for these successfully.

We can also work with you to define shorter-term goals. Identifying such challenges can be difficult as the tendency is to define them by solution, but we can work with you to ensure that they are well-formed and tractable Innovation challenges.

Lack of leadership support

This is aligned to defining the purpose of Innovation, and highlights the importance of having a singular agreed purpose throughout the organisation. If you are not given the space or time to follow an effective process then the results will be poor.

Innovation is not a linear journey. You cannot just define the problem, outline the steps you will take and the time for each, and use this to provide a time for when the journey will end. However, we can help you create a clear process that meets your Innovation purpose. As long as you document your progress and have leadership agreement to this purpose then this will grant you the time and space that you need to succeed.

Lack of clarity

This is a simple one – when you meet as a team to agree anything, write it down! What people understand as a meeting outcome is often very different, whereas if you write it down then there is a much smaller opportunity for misunderstanding. This is particularly true for challenge statements, agile goals and user insights.

We have developed Innovation processes that use written stage-gates and scorecards as a way of minimising this misunderstanding.