The Greatest Challenges to Innovation in the Organisational Environment of South African Institutions Opinions on the challenges hampering innovation progress in organisations centred on the fact that innovation is often ‘talked’ but rarely ‘walked’ internally. People experience silo approaches to innovation, leadership obstruction and low risk tolerance. Other challenges include insufficient budget and resource allocation and not sufficient focus and time allotment to innovation efforts.
Distinguishing the Successful from the Unsuccessful Organisation According to the feedback received, successful organisations innovating into the future will: • Be habitual and non-accidental innovators; • Understand the role of innovation within the organisation; • Pro-actively plan for innovation; • Have flexible and lean value chains; • Be customer centric and relationship driven; • Not go at it alone, rather, externally and internally connected and networked.
The Last word on Innovation Management Interesting comments were posted in conclusion that to a great degree summarised the findings of this poll. Highlights are provided below: • Innovation remains something that is prized, but not managed or driven adequately; • Innovation management has to really put a lot of emphasis on the softer issues around employees; • Innovation needs to be part of an organisation’s strategy for it to be effective; and • People often feel like lone rangers and would appreciate the backing of an institution.
Conclusion The results of this poll provide an emerging picture of South African organisations being very aware of the importance of innovation. Organisations also know what should be done in this regard, for example, formal strategic planning, networking, interaction, collaboration, measurement and external linkages. It is however evident that the required level of strategic intelligence for innovation is not yet in place at most firms (only 44.9% have a formal innovation strategy), and South African organisations are not yet externally orientated. Innovation activity predominantly takes place in an ad-hoc manner (decentralised focus 57.9%), reward and recognition mechanisms are not addressed adequately (38.8% actively reward innovation efforts) and innovation value are not sufficiently demonstrated (only 26.8% actively measure innovation outcomes). This last point reinforces the view that innovation receives more lip service than actual strategic support or financial backing. Strategic financial investment often requires an indication of ROI or a measurement of outcomes - and measuring innovation return is lacking in the local innovation domain.
90 Management Today | September 2012
It does however signify the nature of the innovation management beast in South Africa. Our sample consisted mostly of general Business (39%), the Finance and Banking sector (36.4%) and Government and Parastatals (19%). Most of the innovation outcomes in these industries are process orientated or incremental in nature and the ultimate benefit of this type of innovation outcome is often difficult to measure. In conclusion, one can observe that the picture painted here is certainly not rosy. Considering that the participants mostly represented active innovation managers, one can expect the results to be positively biased. A larger sample would therefore almost certainly paint a darker picture. The good news is that South African organisations are realising the importance of innovation and that the necessary steps are being taken in the right direction. In terms of adoption, South Africa is certainly moving up the innovation management life-cycle S-curve.
So how does this result compare to the status quo in other countries? There are always exceptions, but according
to Professor Oerlemans, South African organisations still lag behind their counterparts
The Innovation Journal
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