What are the most common mistakes in leading innovation and entrepreneurship initiatives?

The opposite can also be true. Being overly specific may hinder a good solution and hamper the creativity of team members. Finding a sweet spot to move the project forward and allow some tuning in the project review process is key. The other problem is to not fall into the trap of creeping elegance that will suffocate a project.

Leading innovation and entrepreneurship initiatives requires foresight, adaptability, and risk-taking. Common mistakes include: 1) Not fostering a culture that embraces change and encourages diverse thinking, 2) Failing to allocate adequate resources or time for exploration, 3) Relying too heavily on past successes rather than anticipating future shifts, 4) Overlooking the importance of rapid prototyping and feedback loops, and 5) Not being prepared for setbacks or viewing failures as fatal rather than as growth opportunities. Successful leadership demands both vision and humility.

Leadership in innovation and entrepreneurship often falters when there's a lack of clear vision and misalignment between ideas and market needs. A common mistake includes prioritizing perfection over timely execution, leading to missed opportunities. Failing to foster a culture that embraces risk and encourages learning from failures can stifle creativity and innovation. Additionally, underestimating the importance of a diverse team that brings varied perspectives and skills to navigate complexities and generate novel solutions can hinder both innovation and entrepreneurial success.

Una herramienta ?? que me resulta útil al momento de definir el problema principal es el "árbol de problemas", que mediante una lluvia de ideas nos permite diferenciar causas de las consecuencias, los cuales suelen confundirse con el PROBLEMA. Es así que al organizarlos y enlazarlos resulta más sencillo poner en el medio el problema o dolor del consumidor.

Landing big, innovative ideas hinges on well-articulated problem statements. Here's a straightforward approach to aid in formulating a statement: [User] has [problem] when [trigger]. Kicking things off with simplicity enables engineering teams to engage in collective problem exploration, diving into details regarding the current customer situation, their objectives, the obstacles impeding goal attainment, and the envisioned outcome.

When validating assumptions, great innovation opportunities can also hide in redefining the problem you are trying to solve. You might have the wrong solution to the problem you defined, but perhaps you simply have the perfect solution to a problem you didn’t think about! Think of how the sticky notes were invented.

Another prevalent mistake among engineering managers is the failure to validate their assumptions concerning the problem, the solution, and the market. These assumptions often rely on personal opinions, beliefs, or intuition, and may not always be accurate or comprehensive. When engineering managers neglect to test these assumptions through experiments, surveys, or interviews, they run the risk of developing solutions that lack demand, necessity, or market value. To sidestep this pitfall, engineering managers should leverage tools like lean canvas, hypothesis testing, and minimum viable products. These tools aid in pinpointing and validating critical assumptions, fostering a culture of learning from feedback and data-driven insights.

Wanting to foster a culture of innovation is step 1. An innovative culture is dependent not only on leaders within engineering and design teams but more often specific people with critical creative skills. Every engineer should be able to solve problems but to solve them in unique, innovative, ingenious ways requires a special mindset. Ensure your team has people in it who are naturally creative and strive to solve problems others have tried and failed to. People who are prepared to go against the grain and even upset one or two senior leaders in the process of proving their new concepts and ideas. Don’t get hung up on brainstorms and activities. Get the people who regularly come up with ideas to come up with more ideas. ??

You got to execute and follow your innovation til production. Perseverance, Market knowledge, Needs from Customer, Time to market TTM, Adapted to OEM Car, Teamplayer, is needed and Leadership for being a team member and not a commander. Know what is needed, and how you can make profit, instead of dreaming in patents ( dark matter of each innovation). The hardest work ever done last 40 years bringing and taking innovations to production, as a team - alone you are nothing!

A prevalent error among engineering managers is the failure to cultivate a culture of innovation within their teams and organizations. Such a culture encourages creativity, experimentation, collaboration, and embracing lessons from failures. Without this culture, engineering managers may encounter resistance, fear, or complacency among team members, peers, or senior leaders. This can hinder the utilization of diverse talents, perspectives, and ideas essential for fostering innovation. Tools can aid in conveying the value and purpose of innovation, measuring and celebrating progress and achievements, and acknowledging and incentivizing innovative behaviors and practices.

I think this is one of the key points that blocks innovation. Micromanaging, or fear-based cultures, limit innovation. Where diversity is not truly sought and celebrated, innovation will be limited to certain world-views and likely biased as diverse perspectives either aren't there or are silenced. I see the first step to an innovative culture is to actively recruit a diverse team (age, culture, personality, experience, education, race, gender, etc) and build psychological safety. Then, there must be equitable ways to contribute that encourage different kinds of mental processing. I have worked with teams where they lost opportunities for diverse contribution by only brainstorming, which misses the chance for full contribution from all

Effective stakeholder management is often underestimated but is crucial for project success. Stakeholders encompass a broad range of individuals or entities with an interest or influence in the initiative, including customers, users, partners, investors, suppliers, regulators, and employees. Failing to understand their needs, expectations, and concerns, and not engaging them transparently and respectfully, can lead to conflicts, misunderstandings, or outright opposition that jeopardizes the initiative's success. Prioritize key stakeholders, establish regular communication channels, and ensure their feedback and insights are incorporated into the initiative's decision-making processes.

I often find this as a key gap for teams, that they haven't even thought of or fully defined their stakeholders. When stakeholder management isn't done, the team either creates work that doesn't add value, or they are constantly jerked around between different parties. Taking time early in a project to define stakeholders and create both information and decision methods allow the team to make sure that the work they do is adding value.

A fifth critical mistake that engineering managers often make is failing to scale and sustain innovation. Scaling and sustaining innovation entails taking validated solutions and making them accessible, affordable, and available to a broader market while ensuring they consistently deliver superior value over time. Neglecting this aspect can result in losing competitive advantages, market share, or customer loyalty to competitors offering better or more cost-effective solutions.

Another perspective is ‘Interpersonal Skill’ between the founding members &/or the internal stakeholders of the initiative. While this is important at all stages of an organisation, it’s most critical factor that holds potential to make or kar the entrepreneurial efforts of the key stakeholders. They being the epicentre of all that happens in & across their organisation, it’s most critical that the focal point is kept strategically & functionally dynamic, focused, resilient, impact-proof, open & yet balanced internally. ‘Ego’ & ‘I’ of these stakeholders must be dusted off to the most latent layer of one’s psyche. One storm here can force the entire organisation to extreme distractions & subsequent disorientation - the curse of a venture.

1) Distinguishing the difference between invention and innovation (reinventing a wheel instead of just making it better) 2) Creating solutions for unknown or non-existent problems (the “oh that’s cool” effect) 3) Valuing process over progress (death at the end of the runway)

I would like to bring a perspective to the comment stating we should distinguish innovations from inventions. Inventions are a form of innovation, they are not a separate topic or category. The term I have seen used to differentiate “new creations” from “improvements” in literature on the topic is radical VS incremental innovations. A good book on the topic of the strengths and strategies of radical innovations in business context is Zero to One. In our complex world, depending on the size of the project, a series of incremental innovations may also lead to a radical innovation. Think of the cell phone. It took many incremental improvements in various fields to generate the ground braking invention. The perspective matters.

Here’s the paradox. Engineers hate bureaucracy, yet every time there is any problem or opportunity, they tend to create it. Engineers are by nature process oriented and they like to define everything. The result is too many committees, too many steps, and too much documentation. All of that can stifle innovation and creativity.

First of all, let's acknowledge that this is difficult to do well. I've found that innovation often arises because someone on the team is working through a problem based on their experience. Therefore, we pass the hurdle that says that this is a real problem people are trying to solve, not just something we've dreamed up in a conference room. Successful organizations then apply a working tool set to assess whether this is worth pursuing (e.g. 5 Whys, Pareto Analysis). Will someone pay to solve the problem? Is the market large enough? Can our solution be delivered with an attractive margin? With this type of rough framework, and a first customer, anything is possible! Of course, the first solution may not be the final product...

Some of the hurdles I have been through: 1) not putting users up and front, often you struggle between prioritizing use cases of features emphasized by leadership vs users. Also sometimes the project is put forward by leadership and you have a hard time involving the users. In some cases the users have seen multiple consultants coming in or initiatives that has happened that lost faith and you are ??another?? one so user buy in extremely hard and needs a lot of work 2) often as a delivery manager you are accountable but not much say about ??scope?? ??budget?? ??time?? ?? resources?? you often have to educate leadership about expectation management especially for R&D projects 3) thinking the path to PoC to MVP to Scale is linear.