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The most common mistake in innovation

Jan



The most common mistake is to make one person or a small group responsible for innovation. That's strangles innovation slowly as the following happens:

The director calls everyone together for an announcement. “We have to innovate! And you know what? John will be our new innovation director. Please give him all your support”. The rest of the team then wishes John good luck and sits back awaiting his plans and initiatives. But that year John will never achieve the desired results, as he came up with great ideas all right, but nothing materialized. And that’s what innovation actually means: transforming ideas into reality. The rest of the organization wass focusing on the short term, way to busy to spend time and money on John’s ideas for the future.

The most common mistake is to monopolize innovation, as you can’t innovate alone. You can only innovate together.

The secret sauce is to create collective ownership for innovation and start to We-nnovate, instead of I-nnovate. 

By Gijs van Wulfen

Keywords: Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Open Innovation

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