Navigating Innovation Roadblocks: Key Differences Between Innovative and Non-Innovative Organizations

From the Introduction section:|Innovation continues to be an area with which organizations and leaders struggle. In fact, innovation was identified as one of the primary challenges organizations face based on a survey of over 1,000 leaders around the world (Martin, 2007). Given that leaders and organizations seem to care a great deal about being innovative, what is holding them back? Why aren’t companies as innovative as they want to be? In order to better understand how innovation works in organizations, the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL®) conducted an online survey of 485 people from organizations around the globe, asking them to share their experiences with innovation in the workplace, including what their organizations do to encourage innovation and what common roadblocks they face when trying to implement innovation. We present new insights from this research that shed light on the gap between the desire for innovation and the effective implementation of innovation within organizations. Specifically, we discuss:|• the extent to which organizations struggle with innovation;|• the key differences between organizations that are effective and ineffective at innovation;|• the common roadblocks that prevent innovation in organizations;|• ways leaders and organizations can improve their innovation efforts.