Bad habits seem to always reoccur even when we work on trying to eradicate them.

Or we ignore the warning signs that were ‘signalling’ the problem until it is too late?

For me, innovation has eight possible pitfalls or sinkholes that we need to consciously try to avoid. Some are in our hands, others are clearly out of our hands but all we can do is try to be aware of them so we can avoid them as best we can. We sometimes need to be more prepared for these traps based on our judgement and experience.

We need to become more explicit1. Failing to make innovation explicit

If we don’t set the appropriate context, provide the background understanding or provide what we know up to now, we leave our ideas, innovation or intents far too open. We end up with thousands of ideas, with 95% useless as the context was not explained.

Meeting agendas that have no structure do the same thing, we end up rambling and in a worse outcome than when we started. Making innovation explicit and aligned to the organization’s vision, its objectives, and its strategy and knowing what is core and what is not, makes innovators’ activities far more explicit.

2. Lack of appropriate resources
This is the constant battle, the real tension point within any project. We hear “not enough in high priority areas”, “unbalanced…too little to late”, “to much in creativity not enough in execution”, “we don’t have enough discipline” or “our research dominates and restricts development” and finally “reduced involvement of the commercial people in the process.”

These all signal misappropriation of resources or a lack of them being available at the appropriate time. This is a real sinkhole we all seem to drop down into.

3. Missing Enabling Structures
When we talk about our innovation process we tend to think in the singular, we tend to view this as linear. Both of these are wrong. If innovation was such a linear process wouldn’t it be so much easier.

For me, the innovation process is a little like playing ‘snakes and ladders’ when I was young, constantly going back down or quickly climbing up but each fresh roll of the dice might send me one way or the other.

How often do we separate out venture units, create spinouts, hive off dedicated business development groups, encourage skunk works or separate different innovations? The more we recognize innovation requires different approaches than the one pipeline or stage-gate approach so much the better.

We need to encourage top leadership sponsorship of unique ideas that need to be separated out, we need to often apply different tools and techniques to different types of innovation.

We need to go outside far more and access our networks and collaborative environment and enable ‘them’ to assist or drive the innovation as inside it might get caught up in traditional thinking and narrow metrics.

4. Insufficient Insights
So what do customers really want from innovation? We never seem to complete enough research or test enough validations. We tend to allow personal judgement or biases to creep in or even drive decisions. We fail to fully map the jobs to be done or really look hard for the unmet needs as places where new innovation solutions can resolve.

The promise of connecting into a social stream of engaged people, working their replies to your rapid prototypes, test pitches, rough designs, validation of concepts will rapidly shift insights into less insufficient and more into ‘too many. Both have pitfalls.

5. Insufficient Engagement
Is the whole organization engaged in improving, in encouraging innovation, in contributing to the thinking, design and validating? Does the leadership offer a stimulating environment where you want to get involved, or are large parts of the organization being totally disengaged, demotivated and disinterested?

If there is no clarity in roles, contributions, seeing your value and worth, feeling totally aggrieved about recognition and rewards then engagement suffers badly. Getting anyone to be motivated to help, to contribute, to go the extra mile needs positive engagement.

Insufficient time on putting in place all the enablers means a very tough environment for the few who are engaged to achieve what they believe is possible. Insufficient Engagement from our leaders and colleagues is a real pitfall or roadblock to innovation.

6. Weak Innovation Processes
Between business strategy and product portfolio is one. A lack of discipline in the management of the innovation portfolio. A lack of clarity of purpose and design.

We often see weak front ends in how ideas are captured, then enriched without referencing back to need or intent and developed in independent silos’s so the end result comes out as a misfit of what is needed or initially thought.

We have this constant ability not to say no and allow concepts to drag on instead of being killed off so the resources can be channelled into something more relevant.

How often do you squeeze all your product development through the same evaluation process, because it is the policy?

How often do you see emotion getting in the way or certain parties involved in the process strongly influence the decision making process on their position of power.

All indicate weak innovation processes.

7. Lack of Balance
We often do not work all the different types of innovation available. We stick with what we are supposedly good at. We churn out the incremental product updates but fail to explore all the ten innovation types.

…or we don’t think through Geoffrey Moore’s suggestions discussed in his book “Dealing with Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of Their Evolution”,

This is where innovation is considered in the context of the category life cycle, with the category being the product or service term used by customers that distinguish what it is they are buying. In this context,

Moore defines innovation types consisting of:

Then you have the work that I and Jeffrey Philips undertook back in 2011 on the whole area of exploring a Collaborative Innovation Framework where we went into considerable detail on the whole collaborative bit, and within this completed an examination of innovation types which are discussed on the wiki at http://cirf.pbworks.com

8. Rapid Shifts in Landscapes
Finally we have such rapid shifts taking place all around us, we are often poor at recognition of change. We fail to make the context and connection of what that change really means.

We simply don’t spot changes or often simply chose to ignore them as they disturb today’s business. I’m still surprised how poor many organizations are at making a really comprehensive competitive watch.

They get share numbers, they see the promotion activity but there are so many sources of competitive intelligence that can build up a depth in knowledge to help anticipate or determine points of competitive difference that your customers will value and appreciate.

Lastly in this sinkhole category, there are such global movements in conservation, environment, emerging economies, demographic disparities, social trends and technology convergence going on, that all these do need constantly factoring into your innovation thinking. We often fail to consider ‘all’ the picture.

In Summary

Of course, you have the ‘common’ pitfalls of innovation we also tend to fall into. These include focusing too much on short term results, having unsupported performance measurement systems, often a lacklustre the leadership of innovation, the hiring of the wrong employees for innovation work or not having a process to track and develop innovative ideas. All create deeper pitfalls.

Just remember sinkholes can just simply open up in front of you unexpectedly and you have suddenly sunk without trace. Working consciously on all the possible pitfalls around innovation can help you to avoid these unexpected moments.

My best advice, keep moving around, stay nimble and fill in all those holes as they emerge, by working on them all the time, consciously. Spot the gaps, fill them quickly, but keep circling around on the lookout for the next one that could derail your innovation efforts, they are potential all around you.

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Publishing note:  This blog post was originally written on behalf of Hype and with their permission, I have republished it on my own site with some small adjustments. I recommend you should visit the Hype blog site where they have a range of contributors writing about a wide-ranging mix of ideas and thoughts around innovation, its well worth the visit.

The post Eight possible pitfalls or sinkholes around innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

If we get to this point we are not just the ones in danger but we more than often involve others in this stupidity, with potentially serious consequences for all involved.

Organizations so often leave their own futures to the last minute by failing to recognize or acknowledge they are running out of time, the situation they have been so use too for such a long time has suddenly changed.

Well, for the vast majority, there was nothing “sudden” about it, they simply left it too late, ignoring all the warning signs and they decided to cross that “red light” as a last-minute panic to catch up and be back in charge of their innovation destiny.

Often all organizations want to do is get back in control, revert to being comfortable, managing “as usual” but in the process have missed so much innovation opportunity in these panic moments because they did not plan for it. T

hey just had a simple failure in not anticipating and thinking ahead, they “ran the amber”, not being alert to their surroundings and wanting to learn so as to adapt to changing conditions.

Not being open and receptive to reacting and exploring, in different more flexible ways, they simply have no time to manage changing events, they are suddenly out of their comfort zone.

They spin out of control and lose all traction.

Anticipation is something that always needs us being in “heighten awareness”
It doesn’t matter if it is driving a car, positioning ourselves to receive a pass on the football field we all need to anticipate, to be aware, to get into this ‘heighten awareness’, into the position to “receive”.

Otherwise, we are often left as the suckers or the ones that deal with the after-effects. So why is it, that organizations’ are so poor at developing heightened awareness?

As we appreciate “heightened awareness” is the idea of “having a higher appreciation, knowledge of, and consciousness of your connection between the physical plane, and the spiritual plane”.

Or in organizations speak, knowing what is going on, both inside your organization and connecting it to the marketplace. Heightening our awareness of innovation needs consistent renewal and anticipation, being alert to changes taking place in and around in our environments.
It is in this “heightened awareness” we can bring together observation and listening skills from what we can gather from the marketplace.

Often in this state, we are discovering unmet needs, jobs-to-be-done that customers need solutions for. You can’t achieve this if you are not alert and clearly drawn into yourself, often in the mistaken belief you know.

You know what it takes, how long it takes and you simply relax and suddenly you are caught out, as you cut corners and get caught out by others who have taken the time and invested in this “heightened awareness” plane and thought through their innovation journey.

These are the ones who don’t need to ‘run the red light’ as they allowed enough  time to be totally aware of their environment and  found innovation opportunity on each street corner, because they were alert to what was going on around them.

They not only planned the journey, they took the time to enjoy and remind themselves of why they were travelling in the first place, not just to get to the next destination as quickly as possible but to get there through appreciating the how, where and what as their contribution to improving “things”.

When we simply get caught up in our day-to-day lives, our world, our needs, we disconnect and then we again, simply, ‘run the red light’ as we need to suddenly, simply, just catch up but often it is just too late.

Developing Organizational Awareness

We do need to be so much more proactive. That is so easy to offer as a “catchy” solution as we can’t add a further one hour into our crowded days so easily but it is strange but whenever we are “proactive” we are stopping, reflecting and starting to structure our days far more consciously.

We confront face-to-face that running out of time, that flirting with danger by “jumping the red lights.” We begin to systematically break down short and long-term organizational needs based more on what is going on all around us, so we can lessen the pressures, heighten the understanding and simply allow more tuning in to innovation opportunity that is on that “every corner”.

This growing awareness begins to “process” the vast number of variables that must be analyzed before a true solution can be delivered because we have allowed some thinking and experimental time and worked out the journey a little bit more. Our minds actually unclutter as we sort our thinking and build in more proactive.

Being inquisitive, being curious, being aware

Innochat, (www.innochat.com) a weekly one-hour, highly fast paced “twitter chat” that goes on each week on Thursday, is a place for anyone who cares to contribute to the innovating topic of that week, and in this past particular week we discussed curiosity.

In writing this post I made a further connection in my reflections from these exchanges. Let me explain, Drew Marshall, who facilitated this session, offered a “framing post” around curiosity and one point just struck such a cord for me here: Curiosity in Intersections – the way in which thinking between subjects leads to innovation.

In Drew’s blog piece he talks about multi-switching where we need to recognize patterns and discern what these mean. In Drew’s view it is the innovators ability to rapidly switch from one area of curiosity to another.

Then he discusses multi-tasking as something potentially different. In multi-tasking an individual is moving quickly from one activity, or task within an activity, to another. Drew points out that the multi-tasker’s brain cannot fully focus when multitasking and therefore takes longer to complete tasks and they are predisposed to error.

We are caught today in a world of multi-tasking and as this seems to be quickening so perhaps we are more “predisposed” to increasing error. We are running the red light more often.

We can’t stop the need to multi-task otherwise we just get left behind but we can stop and think more of the “what if?” to anticipate, to be more alert, to raise our heightened awareness.

As we cross intersections we do need to be far more aware of the connections, not just of the dangers but of the emerging possibilities.

Organizations need to be alert to the dangers of multi-tasking for this risk of increased error.

We do need a “heightened awareness” of what innovation means and as more multi-tasking, more projects are being pushed on existing “everyday work” the risks of “running this red light” is increasing rapidly.

If organizations continue to “push” even harder, then they run the danger of risking more than they expected. More crashes leading to more crisis, to then be managed and then missing out on the alternatives that time helps to allow.

We all certainly need to allow more time

Allowing little time to be aware, to be inquisitive, to spend time investigating, discovering and listening to your customers means you are ignoring the ‘amber’ warning light and suddenly and too late you cross the red light, where you are in real danger of a critical crash- a crash where people leave, because they can’t stand the ‘fear’ or ‘ignorance’ anymore, the fact that there is a new juggernaut crossing your intersection at the same time and you didn’t see it coming and it smashes into you and the result can be fatal.

We must recognize for innovation to thrive, you need to allow time, you need to be fully aware of where the possibilities might be and they are often on every corner. Just don’t cross the red light, rushing to get somewhere and you miss all the positive signals around you and also don’t allow enough time to sense the dangers that might be coming towards you from every direction.

Arrive safely by driving appropriately.

I saw a quote:“I think that growth and spiritual awareness come in slow increments. Sometimes you don’t know its happening”- Mariel Hemingway.

I would argue those that seek and plan, that allow appropriate time and be responsive to others needs, will find “awareness” can come not just in these “incremental moments” but in powerful innovative “waves” due to this heightened awareness.

None of us should run the risk of crossing a red light when it comes to thinking about innovation, always feeling under pressure, desperate, we must allow innovation to “arrive” through the space and time needed for allowing those illuminating moments to (ful)fill your innovation journey.

The post Crossing on a red light at the innovation intersection is really dangerous first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.