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3 Challenges to Help You Set New Benchmarks in Innovation

Note: This article is updated at 3 Challenges to Unleash Innovation.

If you want to change your game, you need to know what the key challenges are.

Innovation is a game that you can play much better, if you know where and how to debottleneck it.

In the book The Future of Management, Gary Hamel shares 3 challenges that he believes can help you unleash your organization’s capacity for innovation.

  1. How can you enroll every individual within your company in the work of innovation, and equip each one with creativity-boosting tools?
  2. How can you ensure that top management's hallowed beliefs don't straightjacket innovation, and that heretical ideas are given the chance to prove their worth?
  3. How can you create the time and space for grassroots innovation in an organization that is running flat to deliver today's results?

According to Hamel, "Make progress on these challenges and your company will set new benchmarks in innovation."

If I think back through the various teams I’ve been on at Microsoft, one team that I was on was especially good at helping innovation flourish, and we were constantly pushing the envelope to “be what’s next.”   Our innovation flourished the most when we directly addressed the challenges above.  People were challenged to share and test their ideas more freely and innovation was baked into how we planned our portfolio, programs, and projects.

Innovation was a first-class citizen – by design.

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