What are the most common barriers to innovation in business strategy?

Common barriers to innovation in business strategy include a resistance to change within the organization, a lack of clear innovation goals and processes, and insufficient resources or investment. Overcoming these barriers involves fostering a culture of adaptability, setting clear innovation objectives, and allocating adequate resources to support creative endeavors.

Amazon's vision is to be earth's most customer-centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online. And this vision guides Amazon's activities.

While a clear vision is key, another subtle yet significant barrier is organizational inertia. Even with a compelling vision, deeply ingrained habits, processes, and mindsets can stifle innovation. Employees accustomed to "how things have always been done" might resist novel approaches. This inertia is often exacerbated by a fear of failure. In many organizations, failure, even when it results from genuine innovation efforts, is penalized. To truly foster innovation, businesses must cultivate an environment where calculated risks are encouraged, and failures are viewed as learning opportunities. This cultural shift, paired with a clear vision, can propel genuine, impactful innovation in business strategy.

Certainly, a lack of a clear vision can be a significant barrier to innovation in business strategy. Without a well-defined innovation strategy and clear objectives, it's challenging to guide and motivate employees and stakeholders toward innovative goals. Developing a comprehensive and communicated vision is essential for successful innovation initiatives.

Most companies do not consider innovation as part of business strategy, which is a huge mistake because innovation shed light to a more competitive approach. But innovation without direction/strategy aligned, which is another common problem, takes the company to put effort on something that could not generate value.

Nokia is one of the Prime example which resisted change too long. They thought they were too big to fail. The company faced resistance at every level of management. The leadership was not transparent about the vision or goals they wanted to achieve. That's why the didn't want to use android when other companies were embracing. Nokia finally realized but it was too late. They could never revive back, no matter how much Microsoft invested.

Is not easy overcome resistance to change, but there's fewer things that I use to do, and works well. Even before spreading the word of innovation and building strategy, begin with trainings, workshops and bring case study to show people how innovation can leverage business. Then you start fostering the culture of innovation.

Innovation is always a plus, in business strategy vision, but it is a must have nowadays. Considering at least 1% of your revenue to innovation projects, you overcome money problem, and during the yearly strategic planning, prioritize the innovation projects to be developed and executed on next year.

Debemos ser cautelosos con querer encuadrar a la innovación en el mismo molde de los demás procesos operativos de la empresa. La innovación es hacer lo que nadie ha hecho antes y para eso muchas veces se necesita hacerlo de formas que nadie lo ha hecho antes.

People have innovative ideas during the whole year, and the company has their own innovation projects to run, to have a good innovation governance, you should build an innovation funnel to screen the ideas and projects that may arise along the year.

La innovación corporativa requiere lo que llamo las 3 Rs: Respaldo, recursos y retos. Respaldo, de la alta gerencia, pues la innovación corporativa requiere asumir riesgos y cambiar enfoques lo que sólo puede lograrse con el apoyo de quienes toman las decisiones. Recursos. La innovación es costosa por dos razones. Primero porque requiere que se le dediquen recursos humanos y financieros a algo que no sabemos si funcionará ni cuándo funcionará. Por otro lado, muchas innovaciones requieren el uso de nuevas tecnologías, las que usualmente tienen un costo elevado mientras son innovadoras. Retos. Finalmente, es necesario que las organizaciones tengan algún desafio o amenaza para que puedan innovar. Y mientras más difícil, mejor.

Many leaders are used to running strategy formulation processes in traditional ways, inside the “dark room”, only emerging to announce the strategy once endorsed by the board. The difficulty with this is that it trigger adverse neurological reactions amongst staff who fear the change, and resist the recommendations as they haven’t been involved in the development. They therefore lack the understanding and context. A better way is to undertake and open strategy process where staff are actively involved in developing options or implementation plans. This ensures buy in for the eventual approach that is chosen. And an easier path to execution.