Why Johnny Can't Innovate

I have had a unique opportunity over the last five years to teach and facilitate product and process innovation to nearly one hundred leading companies, many in the Fortune 500. Each week, I work side by side with thought leaders and senior management from many industries. Over the years, I have noticed a common set of six barriers to successful innovation. I witness these barriers week after week, independent of the specific company I am working with or its industry sector (though each company / sector adds its own unique spice of personality, politics, and process to the problem). This article is the first in a series in which I would like to share some of my observations.

In 1955, Rudolf Flesch wrote of the poorly-developed reading skills of contemporary American children, in his well known classic, "Why Johnny Can't Read". In it, he claimed that the education establishment was failing by teaching reading skills as a “read and guess” method of word association to subject context.

When it comes to innovation skills, we rarely seek out any education or skill training before the need arises to come up with a game changing idea. Most innovation practitioners, in my experience, are self-taught on a just-in-time basis. As a result, bright ideas from thought leaders tend to appear (initially) through serendipity. Consequently, repeatable innovation means guessing, a lot. The practice of innovation, then, becomes an exhaustive experience, which sets up many possibilities for failure. Innovation, taking on the stigma of risk and failure, is avoided as a general practice. It is instead marched out for special circumstances (usually a crisis), which, as a result, guarantees that a prior lack of institutional learning of fundamental innovation barriers, will stop innovation time and again.

So, in the spirit of a similar question asked over fifty years ago (with the understanding that our protagonist can be male or female):

Why can't Johnny innovate?

In my experience, some or all of the following six reasons (in no specific order) will likely stop Johnny from coming up with a great idea.

• He doesn’t have any incentive.
  
• He doesn’t have the time.
  
• He’s disconnected from key technical expertise.
  
• He’s not trained, adept, or comfortable with proactive, creative thought.
  
• He doesn’t have immediate or easy access to critical knowledge.
  
• He can’t look beyond his immediate problem-solving needs.
  

Even in reviewing this succinct list, there are, no doubt, short term measures which innovation practitioners, managers, and executives can take to avoid the more immediate barriers. Such measures, however, rarely translate into sustainable innovation practices or organizational transformation to a highly-effective innovation company.

Over the coming weeks, I will be offering in follow-on articles some of my observations from the field as to how each of these barriers to innovation manifest themselves, and how to mitigate or eliminate their impacts on the innovation practitioner, organization, and company.