At the same time nearly every day new messages about hacked databases and published personal data reach us – you all know the group called Anonymous.

So hackers can break into (air) traffic control systems, the NASA network, intelligence corps, health insurance and police databases as well as army systems and air force drones. Is hoping that the ideas, that inevitably come up in our minds won’t turn into reality, the only thing we can do? Well, we can try to secure and encrypt all our data but history taught us that mostly hackers are by far faster than data security experts.

The solution (at least if you have a disposedness to black humor): We all can hope that hackers are peaceloving idealists with a vow of poverty.

credit: Dept. of Chemistry, University of Wisconsin

• What: What are we trying to accomplish with the innovation effort? What are the goals and measures we’ll use? What risks are we willing to face? What sacred cows should we avoid?
• Why: Why are are innovating? Why not keep doing what we are doing? Why does an innovation effort make sense? Why innovate around this particular issue or opportunity?
• When: When do you want results? When can we have the people and budgets we need? When can we get started?
• Where: Where should we focus our efforts? Where in the future is our target? Where are the prospects and customers we should consider?
• Who: Who is the financial sponsor? Who will adopt or commercialize the ideas? Who is the ultimate customer of our ideas? Who is the final arbiter in case of disagreements? Who will staff this project?
• How: How should we work? How will the existing tools and techniques be helpful? How can we use new techniques? How do we deploy innovation in our business?

As often the striking things are good guidelines not just because they are easier to remember. I would really recommend to answer these questions when seriously thinking about realizing an innovation idea.

Among the main barriers the following three things are mentioned:

1. Requirements: Unclear, lack of agreement, lack of priority, contradictory, ambiguous, imprecise.
2. Resources: Lack of resources, resource conflicts, turnover of key resources, poor planning.
3. Schedules: Too tight, unrealistic, overly optimistic.

Reading this you may say: “That’s not a mystery. You can learn this in a basic project management training.” But still these problems are part of daily business. I also experience this regularly.

As so often the solution sounds quite easy but the implementation seams to be pretty hard … that’s in fact the same thing with innovation barriers.

Based on that he points out three main drivers (she calls them “fundamental lean behaviors” what I wouldn’t do because they are imho no “behaviors”) for innovation:

• customer focus
• problem solving
• learning

Jamie also says in advance that this will not necessarily end up in world-changing innovations but I 100% agree that this is a great fundament for at least incremental product and service development.

But if you want to find radical innovations you have not only to allow failures you have to encourage them. You think that’s to hard? To my mind this is the only way shake up people and give them the spiritedness to have no more fear of saying: “That was wrong. We made a mistake.” And such sentences are crucial for innovation processes. Maybe you can achieve some incremental enhancements without making failures, but for radical change you cannot avoid them. Or to say it with Daniel’s words:

The problem is: innovation is not a science. It doesn’t work from the top-down. It works from the bottom-up. You can’t decide ahead of time that every problem has a solution that this particular team can discover. What I want to see in my agile teams is the ability to say “The parameters you have given us preclude us from achieving the goals you want. Therefore we must stop.”