Innovation Slipping. (The Creativity Suite. Episode 120)

Innovation Slipping is the insidious, slow and barely noticeable decline in innovation over time as a company gets older and more established.

When a company is founded, it’s often buzzing with innovation, but then processes are set up, procedures get cemented, and inertia sets in. Pride in past successes blocks the urge to find new ones.

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And slowly, innovation slips.

But Innovation Slipping is reversible, if a company really focuses on getting back on the innovation track. Here are three things you can do:

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1) ?Change from having a financial focus to having a transformational focus.?

?Less about measuring what has been done and more on looking forward to what we could or should be doing.

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2) Change from an “operational mindset” to an “innovation mindset”.

A well-oiled machine is great, but organizations are not machines. There needs to be a space and a place to try new things out, to experiment and to, yes, fail.

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3) Change from thinking of “an innovative organization” to thinking of “an organization of innovators.”

?Organizations do not invent anything. People do. Focus on how you get the most creativity out of your people and how to best support their creative potential.

It’s possible to reverse the effects of an organization suffering from innovation slipping, but to do that, you need to be aware of a crucial observation: You slip when you are not paying attention.

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A person not seeing the wet spot on the floor - or the banana peel ?- is the one who slips.

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And an organization that will suffer from innovation slipping is an organization where the leadership is not paying attention to what’s happening to their innovation.

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Innovation Focus is the antidote to Innovation Slipping.

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This observation was inspired by a conversation with Arturo Martinez Torres, Innovation & Technology Leader at Grupo Quimmco.