دانلود رایگان مقاله بررسی ساختار ، سیستم، فرهنگ و تلاش برای نوآوری

Abstract

When it comesto driving organizational performance, innovation is widely touted as a critical capability. Whether the focus is internal and on finding ways to improve efficiency or external and on understanding what the market desires next, leaders seeking to enhance performance will rely on their company’s ability to successfully bring new ideas to the fore. Unfortunately, leaders who sense their company is experiencing an innovation deficit are too often misdiagnosing its cause. Most interventions designed to increase innovation capability focus on unleashing potential among employees; however, most of the barriers to the realization of that capability are created by organizational characteristics. In this installation of Organizational Performance, we report on the successes of a number of companies in which leaders have identified the critical barriers to innovation: structure, systems, and culture. Leaders are encouraged to understand how to invest less in employee innovation capability and more in organizational readiness to support what tends to be an already quite capable workforce.

5. Final thoughts

Looking ahead, there is little reason to believe innovation is going to become less of a priority for companies. Similarly, innovation isn’t going to become easier unless leaders commit to an enduring effort to create the sort of context within which innovation can occur (see Drucker, 1985/2002). Consideration of the efforts undertaken by the companies we studied shows how important structure, systems, and culture are to successfully executing innovation in a manner that produces the sort of results leaders are looking for. The first step toward improving return on innovation is to understand where the bottleneck occurs. It would actually make life simpler if the bottleneck had to do with people. People can be trained or replaced with relatively little disruption. Unfortunately, the true bottleneck is often the result of an inappropriate or misaligned element of structure, systems, or culture. Such problems are much more difficult to fix, but unless leadership commits resources to creating and then maintaining alignment, little else good will come from efforts to grow from innovation.