CEOs find innovation hard to achieve: survey??Reuters.com IBM have just published an interesting survey that states

"nearly two-thirds of the world's top chief executives said that due to pressures from market and competitive forces, they plan to radically alter their companies over the next two years, and corporate leaders are increasingly looking to innovation in their business models to drive growth".

What interested me further about this article was not the proportion of CEOs that are turning to innovation but the follow-up statement from Ginni Rometty from IBM Enterprise Business Services "that it's no longer about product innovation....it's about understanding how to innovate a business model, or an operational process..." This reminds me of an earlier post where I mentioned the how Imaginatik Research has identified over 20 types of innovation (this paper is being prepared a I write). There are so many different areas you can focus on. Ignore them at your peril, one of your competitors wont.

In addition, these findings from IBM identified that only 14% of CEOs thought internal R&D were good sources of new ideas. I'm not surprised by this. Companies we work with at Imaginatik utilize idea management across their entire organizations, to great effect and of course across the many different types of innovation.

And the biggest obstacle these CEO's identified in taking innovation forward? Internal problems in their own organization rather than external ones. And the top one they polled? An unsupportive culture and climate. The main reason they infer is that they are poor at managing change, some 80% of CEOs said they had been very unsuccessful in doing this in the past. I would question what are the common themes here? Was change used to reduce head-count? Were employees engaged properly or at all in any of these change programmes? So change may now be viewed as a bad thing for employees instead of an energizing thing? Innovation is about adding value, CEOs are waking-up to this but their are tough challenges ahead but the good news is there are people who can help.