25 Corporate Innovation Facts You Should Know

Business leaders agree: Innovation is an essential part of long-term, sustainable success, and most business leaders understand this. What they don’t seem to understand is why their innovation projects don’t yield the desired results. For established businesses in highly regulated industries such as healthcare, insurance, and finance, innovation is incredibly elusive. 

We already have data proving that innovative companies grow faster, in both revenue generation and overall valuation. This data justifies the growing investment in innovation among corporate enterprises. Unfortunately, there’s a pretty low success rate when it comes to corporate innovation projects. 

The reality is that most organizations only think about innovation in terms of incremental improvements to existing products or services, and their structures don’t facilitate genuinely transformative and disruptive innovation. This is perhaps the biggest hurdle to successful corporate innovation from which all other roadblocks develop.

It’s not that business leaders don’t understand that their business models are at risk for disruption. Indeed, there’s a long history of startups putting larger, more established competitors out of business with their ability to innovate, iterate, and adapt to market needs. 

Many business leaders might not realize that nearly three-quarters of the most transformative innovations over the last three decades have come from employees working in larger organizations. This should give business leaders hope — they have the talent and ideas to make innovation happen within the organization. They need to create a culture that nurtures experimentation and creativity.

The good news is that corporate enterprises are getting serious about improving their innovation capabilities. Many organizations are starting to task a specific person with ownership of innovation projects and initiatives. Others are beginning to include innovation in strategic planning. Not only does having a documented innovation strategy help the business focus and prioritize innovation projects, it also improves the chances of successful project execution. 

Check out the infographic below for statistics about corporate innovation blockers and what the most successful innovators do differently.