Innovation is systematically stopped in organizations, often by the very people who say they want it and who stand to benefit from it, according to David Owens in his book Creative People Must Be Stopped: 6 Ways We Kill Innovation (Without Even Trying). There are plenty of books containing research and advice on innovation and how to come up with good ideas, but this book aims to expose how and why good ideas are killed and innovations fail despite the wealth of research and advice.
The author says that there are six main ways in which innovations are killed:
- Individuals do not generate enough good ideas to create viable innovations
- Groups allow negative emotions to derail the process of evaluating and implementing new ideas
- Organizations find innovation threatening because they are designed to produce routine and consistent outputs
- Industries are oriented to today’s market needs, and their customers are resistant to altering the economic status quo
- Society rejects or regulates new ideas that are inconsistent with prevailing norms
- New technologies have to demonstrate their effectiveness and reliability before they are adopted
The book goes on to describe in detail each of these six types of innovation constraints, ways of diagnosing which of the constraints is or are applicable to any given innovation situation, and suggestions for applying corrective action designed to overcome each of the constraints. A different diagnostic survey and a set of questions for reflection are provided for each of the six types of constraints, and an appendix gives guidance on how to use the assessment results.
In my view the author’s identification of different categories of innovation constraints is a useful one, because it demonstrates that, while different responses are required for different types of obstacles to innovation, there are limited numbers of types of obstacles and standard corrective actions can be developed for each. I found the book slow going in parts, but in my opinion it provides a helpful addition to the literature on innovation.