By Karen Abrams, MBA
Co-Founder, STEMGuyana
Ima Christian, Stanford University
Co-Founder, STEMGuyana
Building and maintaining the capacity to innovate in public and private institutions in wealthier countries is hard work. Innovation initiatives frequently fail and when organizations create a breakthrough innovation, they have a hard time sustaining their performance. The Harvard Business Review attributes this to a lack of innovation systems within these institutions.
While many organizations often engage in innovation encouraging activities like developing internal entrepreneurial ventures, setting up venture-capital arms, pursuing external alliances, encouraging innovation, crowd collaboration with customers and implementing rapid prototyping—these same organizations often lack innovation systems— a coherent set of interdependent processes and structures that dictates how the organization identifies and prioritizes the search for novel problems and solutions and a set of processes that can synthesize ideas into business concepts and production design.
Companies like Apple, Google, Tesla and others have mastered innovation. Due to the structures of innovation within these companies, many now claim a systemic culture of innovation responsible for generating endless innovations—allowing these companies to grow market-share and reap tremendous profits.
