Five mistaken beliefs business leaders have about innovation
The vast majority of companies want to be innovative, coming up with new products, business models and better ways of doing things. However, innovation is not so easy to achieve. A CEO cannot just order it, and so it will be. You have to carefully manage an organisation so that, over time, innovations will emerge. And CEOs often make a number of common mistakes, that hamper rather than induce such processes. Believe the numbers One common mistake is to insist on “seeing the numbers” too much too soon. “What is the size of the market?”, “what is the Net Presen Value calculation?”, “payback time?”, and so on. What they are forgetting is that, for a truly innovative product, for example, it is impossible to reliably produce any numbers. If a CEO insists on hard numbers before the project is even started, it will by sheer definition kill off any truly innovative ones, simply because you cannot compute the size of a market that does not exist yet. One CEO who understood this well was Intel’...