The silent killer of innovation

There are a lot of things that kill innovation.

• Rigid hierarchies - excessive layers of management and approvals
• Short-term mindset - focusing on short-term results to accomplish misguided KPIs
• Success - being successful can cause a company to stagnate
• Lack of diversity - when everyone acts and thinks the same way diverse ideas aren’t welcome

Larger organizations are especially good at killing innovation. Less so with startups.

Earlier this week I was talking to a Product professional who told me that virtually every decision at a Fortune 100 company went through Legal.

If you work at a large company you may have experienced the bureaucratic red tape that comes with that sort of growth.

You may want to try new things. But, you are worried that it could hurt your reputation or even cost you your career.

That is the silent killer of innovation. It isn’t the things I mentioned above. It’s fear.

Fear is the silent killer of innovation

Fear is at the root of a lack of innovation.

Fear causes people to:

• Avoid taking risks: there will be consequences if I fail!
• Avoid collaboration: what if they think my idea is crazy?
• Avoid breaking old habits: but we’ve always done it this way and its worked!
• Avoid stepping on toes: what if my idea is contrary to someone further up the chain?

I’ve seen this firsthand in my own career.

In 2015 I had the idea to create a venture debt fund. That wasn’t the innovation. The innovation was that I wanted to create it inside a credit union. Up until that time, financial institutions didn’t invest in ideation-stage startups. Banks and credit unions are lenders, not investors. Lenders expect to be paid back through cash flow and brand new startups don’t have consistent cash flow, if any at all.

The way I got around that was to combine the debt and equity funding worlds into one model. For the application process I pulled from the equity funding world and required applicants to pitch their idea to a panel of professionals, including venture capitalists. Then, for the approval process, I used methods from the traditional business lending world, including leveraging Small Business Administration (SBA) guarantees to reduce the lender’s risk.

The program won my credit union and myself national recognition.

Still, the whole thing almost didn’t come to be. Because I almost let fear stop me from pursuing it.

I was convincing my credit union to break old habits and take risks they wouldn’t normally take. There was even internal dissension about the decision to proceed.

Thankfully we did and the program was so well received that today other financial institutions are mirroring our process.

How to be innovative without fear

If you want to foster innovation, you have to remove fear from the equation. I’m not suggesting its ok to be reckless. But, its impossible to be innovative without taking risks.

The whole point of being innovative is that, done well, it creates a competitive advantage which leads to growth and profitability.

To remove fear you need an environment where experimentation, failed experimentation, is not just accepted, its a way of life.

Failure has to be seen as a learning opportunity. In fact, failure should be celebrated. Failure means you just uncovered a way something won’t work. Which is leading you one more step towards how it will work.

Being a champion of innovation doesn’t require being a leader in title. You can be an individual contributor at a company and skill be a champion of innovation.

Do small experiments, with less risky potential outcomes, to get comfortable with the process. Document what you learned and share it with others. You just might encourage someone else to start experimenting.

Ok, if you’ve made it this far, I should take this opportunity to point you towards my latest book, Go-to-Market Made Easy: Your Roadmap to Customer Acquisition. In it I share the process I have used to develop go-to-market strategies for over $300M in product launches.

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