There is a lot of talk these days about the need to innovate and about how to innovate. However, not much thought is given to how easy it is to stop innovation. The dictionary defi nes innovation as something new or different that is introduced.
Now, just look around you and see how many times you hear the words "this is the way it is done" or "this is the way I will do it." Worse still, how many times have you said so yourself?
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| Krishna Kumar |
There is nothing that stops innovation on its tracks as effectively as a "this is the way it is done." If you have been doing something in a particular way day in and day out, it becomes fairly ingrained in you that "this is the way it is done." And you do not only not think up other ways to do things, but also, you end up believing that this is the only way it can be done. That is why, sometimes you get an outsider, a consultant, to take a fresh look at things and ask "why not do it this other way?" Smaller organisations may not have the luxury of hiring a consultant who will ask this question. So, more often than not, in this case, the entrepreneur himself will have to don the hat of the outsider and ask whether there is any other way things can be done. In the rush of everyday business, you often do not have the time or bandwidth to sit back and ponder that question. And thus, innovation dies.
It also takes a lot of will power and drive to push through the other way or the innovation. And this drive has to come, if not right from the top, then from someone close enough, since they have to cut through not just existing processes, but also the resistance to change that is manifest in "this is the way it is done." This is reason number two why innovation dies.
And fi nally, innovation like everything else, requires investment. If the innovation is, say, in manufacturing, then you have to create new machines and maybe even new factory layouts and factories themselves. If the innovation is in the way you reach out to your target audience, then there has to be investment made to put them in place in the form of, say, new software systems or communication systems. Making inadequate investments will as surely kill the innovation as saying that it cannot be done any other way!
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