Common Innovation Mistakes & How to Make Innovation Work for You

The good news is the economy is not discouraging small business owners’ innovation attempts. They have good role models. Apple and CNN are two exclamation points in the pantheon of innovative profitable businesses founded during recessions.  But not every business owner makes it into the history books.

For every innovative venture that thrives despite the economic rollercoaster, another business owner is stumped by the pursuit of new. They waste valuable company resources and frustrate their staff in the attempt by falling victim to common innovation mistakes. “Innovation in Turbulent Times,” a report from Harvard Business Review, reveals that the quest for innovation is not responsible for these failures. It is business owners’ belief in common innovation myths.

Common Innovation Mistakes

Perhaps the common mistake of many business owners is ignoring the successful formula of the “both-brain” company. Steve Jobs and Tim Cook, David Packard and Bill Hewlett, Pierre Wertheimer and Coco Chanel are iconic examples of companies with creative and analytic persons at the helm. One functions as the chief executive officer or the brand CEO, the other operates as a creative director, like Steve Jobs, who envisions the iPods for which people clamor.

According to the Harvard Business Review researchers, no industry has mastered this “both-brain” partnership with such consistent success as the fashion industry. Fashion partnerships market products to the masses in times of economic boom or bust. Season after season, the creative and analytic forces within fashion houses work to present clothes consumers never knew they wanted or needed. It works more often than not.

But the ability of a company to develop and promote new products and services is not merely a creative or analytical feat, which is another myth of innovation.

Not long after the iPod made its initial splash on the market, other portable musical players entered the field receiving a lukewarm response.  The imitators could not blame their research and development department. Toe to toe, many of them matched the iPod on the basis of product offerings. What they lacked is the total package—the overall user experience and brand for which Apple is known.

Companies attempting to harness innovation often make the elementary mistake of breaking up the task into components and doling it out to loosely conjoined departments. But a creative team should not run the innovation ship and be expected to produce a return on investment. Harvard Business Review researchers bluntly stated, “They’re likely to fall in love with an idea and never know when to quit.” Left brain leaders face their own innovation stalls in ill-fated brainstorming sessions, which is why both-brain companies pursue innovation partnerships that harness creative and analytic intelligence at every stage of the project.

Even when the magic of innovation occurs amongst the rank and file, products and services with the potential for profit can get stalled in the highest places.  Such is the cost of these common innovation mistakes.

The right of approval often rests with left-brained CEOs. Such oversight is necessary. CEOs are charged with ensuring the strategic direction and financial success of a company. They need to reign in the costs and time innovation-oriented projects can usurp.

Its All About the Balance

Without balancing from right brain leadership, left-brainers can also kill good ideas and create headaches by offering countless good and bad revisions, inflating their project budget. Before they know it, they are sinking the project they are supposed to oversee.

Citing “freedom within a framework,” researchers mention CEOs who then charge their team to execute an idea without drifting into left field with clear cut guidelines of objectives, budgets and methodologies, to which all ideas must adhere. Innovation occurs without the creative staff lingering in the myopia of a project or analytic brains consumed by 20,000-foot view.

Business owners will never stop wielding the tool of innovation. They can avoid unnecessary frustration by abandoning such counterproductive common innovation mistakes. When the force of creativity meets analytic prowess, companies can emerge from economic downtown stronger, leaner and more profitable. In this economy, that is an innovation trick all business owners can believe in.

Dawn S. Smith has garnered critical acclaim for her ability to integrate issues of politics and popular culture into unique hybrid narrative forms. With her company, maisol media, the freelance writer uses her expertise to contribute to communications campaigns for the corporate and non-profit sectors.

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