Cambridge Business Association
Conquering Innovation Fatigue
Book

Conquering Innovation Fatigue

Overcoming the Barriers to Personal and Corporate Success

Jeff Lindsay, Cheryl Perkins and Mukund Karanjikar
Wiley, 2009
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Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Innovative
  • Applicable

Recommendation

Although countless books explain why innovation matters and how to benefit from it, few address the reasons that companies and individuals don’t innovate successfully. That’s where this volume comes in. Jeff Lindsay, Cheryl Perkins and Mukund Karanjikar provide many examples of corporate, political and structural barriers that block innovation, the forces that smother it, and the organizational and social factors that make it difficult. Their analytical book expertly blends research and firsthand perspectives. Though the authors are somewhat fond of jargon and coined terms, their guide is a welcome addition to the innovation canon. getAbstract recommends it to innovators, human resources professionals and executives who want to inoculate their companies against the disease of innovation fatigue.

Summary

Innovation and “Innovation Fatigue”

Innovators in your organization are similar to immigrants in a strange land: They contribute fresh perspectives, but feel out of place. They don’t quite speak the language or fit in smoothly, and they sense that the current inhabitants may resent them. When would-be cutting-edge contributors experience such resistance from a company’s established culture, the result is “innovation fatigue” – a kind of exhaustion creative thinkers can suffer when they try to introduce new ideas into the language of the existing culture. Too often, fatigue wins. An innovator might produce one new concept and let another 100 ideas go unrealized because moving them forward is just too hard. These ideas die unknown even though companies need innovation, which doesn’t lead just to corporate profits, but to better lives as well.

One common metaphor for incubating ideas is a “funnel.” Many new concepts enter its broad cup, but only a few emerge from its narrow tube. From a market viewpoint, this narrowing-down process seems necessary to find the best products to sell. But the “funnel can be hostile” to people with ideas. In its place, consider a “Horn of...

About the Authors

Cheryl Perkins is founder and president of Innovationedge, where Jeff Lindsay is director of solution development. Mukund Karanjikar is a senior associate at Technology Holding LLC.

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