Why Companies Fail to Foster a Culture of Innovation (And What You Can Do about it)

People ask me a lot about the innovation culture - What it means, why it is hard and how it can be fixed. Here is a list of the top four most frequent questions and my short answers.

Q: Why is it tough to develop a culture of innovation in a corporate environment?

Establishing a genuine culture of innovation is tough and there are various reasons why.

Very often companies do not understand this special culture – its foundation and the mechanisms that allow it to grow. Moreover, it takes time to develop it and it can be influenced by so many factors that are not easy to control. As a result, business leaders attempt to establish the innovation culture through isolated innovation programs which can only bring minor, ephemeral improvements.

In general, innovation programs alone typically fail to drive a substantial cultural boost because they tend to stay on the surface. Even those well-designed, expensive innovation programs that introduce the right tools, ceremonies, behaviors, and role models, do not always deliver the desired outcome.

The primary failure factor in such scenarios is the absence of an inner drive and the lack of organic growth of the innovation culture: Innovation needs an internal community of curious, inspired people who experiment, learn and share continually – ‘natural innovators’ who are seen as role models and thus bring more people into this special innovation mode.

Q: What is this ‘innovation culture’ – how it is defined?

In the Innovation Mode I define it as the system of values, behaviors, symbols, and mental models that embrace novelty and change as the drivers of business improvement and success. This definition refers to six specific values, namely trust, safety, openness, curiosity, purposefulness, and healthy competition.

A true innovation culture is based on authentic behaviors of curious people who believe in the organizational purpose and are ready to take risks and experiment with ideas – continually and proactively. The culture of innovation can only evolve from within, organically: it needs time, the right environment, and strong support from the leadership reassuring the importance of innovation as the means of achieving bold organizational goals.

Every company can develop the culture of innovation and gradually reach the ‘innovation mode’ – this special mode of operation where innovation happens naturally, and all the innovation processes and behaviors are fully embedded in the operating system of the organization.

Q: What are the most frequent innovation blockers?

I have a long list of innovation blockers but the most frequent ones have to do with the broken link between innovation programs and organizational purpose, bureaucracy and slow processes, fear of failure, and leadership disconnect.

Q: How can we quickly improve the innovation culture?

I typically recommend various ‘hacks’ to make the organizational structure less rigid and easier to navigate. For example, encouraging people to have cross-team, skip-level meetings with an innovation agenda - as an informal scheme that encourages interaction between innovators and corporate leaders across teams and divisions. For instance, an innovators with a well-articulated innovation opportunity is encouraged to search for the right stakeholders to pitch for the opportunity, explore next steps and also gather feedback and guidance. With the right orchestration, a simple program like that can energize people, connect levels and siloed groups, and bridge the information and attitude gaps; it sends the right message to all directions by promoting meaningful communication vertically and horizontally and of course it increases the chances of spotting high-potential innovation opportunities.

Another program that can drastically improve the innovation culture is what I call a ‘side-experimentation thread.’ A program that encourages people to form virtual, multidisciplinary teams with the intent to experiment with innovation opportunities. It uses a backlog of special experimentation projects and it is sourced primarily through the organizational slack - enables employees who happen to have some availability, to engage with innovation activities and network with the broader community of innovators, across divisions and groups. In this context, people self-organize and innovate - they discover interesting projects and interact across levels and beyond the boundaries of their teams and their formal areas of responsibility; they build strong professional links, break the silos and network across teams and throughout the hierarchy of the company.

In general, I recommend making a longer-term investment in programs that focus on growing an active community of innovators – the inner driver for the innovation culture.