Implement Innovation

There are at least six reasons why organisations find it hard to implement innovations successfully:

1. Many innovations require users to acquire new knowledge and skills: Innovation complexity can negatively affect user satisfaction and the speed required to achieve competence.
2. People easily succumb to the “knowing-doing gap” : Even when people recognise that a specific change would benefit performance, they often fail to do it. People may stick rigidly to rules, resist change, fear failure, or substitute talk for action.
3. Some innovations affect people’s roles, routines, and norms: For example, innovation implementation may require people who usually work fairly independently to coordinate, collaborate and share.
4. Innovation adoption and implementation decisions are usually made by people more senior than the innovation’s target users: Target users are accustomed to the status quo and may perceive innovations as just another fad. Without early user consultation, there may be reluctance to buy-in.
5. Implementation can be time consuming, expensive, and political: Time and money spent on starting up, training, user support, monitoring, mentoring, meetings and evaluations may result in reduced performance in the short-term. Substantial perseverance will be required to succeed.
6. Many innovations, especially technological innovations, are imperfectly designed: The newer the technology, the more likely it is to have problems, bugs, or teething problems that can cause technostress.

Sources: Klein, K. and Knight, A. (2005) Innovation Implementation: Overcoming the Challenge, Current Directions in Psychological Science, 14(5), 243-246; Perlman, K. (2013) Innovation: It’s Not the Idea, It’s What You Do With It, Forbes, Nov 22

Action Point

Determine which of the six barriers are holding you back most from achieving implementation success. What other factors are blocking you?