Struggling to innovate? Examine your structure, systems, and culture

When it comes to 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.