Governments in the western world are constantly complaining about the lack of innovation in their respective countries. Their solution inevitably is to provide financial incentives to encourage corporate executives to invest in R&D and new product development. While these incentives might be helpful, they fail to address the major issues concerning the failure of companies to innovate.

A company might have all the funds necessary to innovate but chances are that their employees lack both a process and skills that are essential to innovation. As companies grow, they face huge challenges in bringing employees together to collaborate to generate new products, processes, methods and procedures. When employees finally meet to create something new and different, they typically engage in brainstorming sessions that lack depth and structure. These sessions also tend to be rushed – most attendees don’t have sufficient time that is necessary to properly innovate. To make matters worse, employees tend to generate solutions without considering if they’re in agreement over the nature of the real problems that the team faces. And, even if the team generates a great solution, they typically fail miserably at the implementation stage.

The innovation process requires that employees have the necessary skills that are essential to the innovation process. Creativity sessions are frequently characterized by team members who shoot others’ ideas down – which kills the creativity process. Individuals tend to have attitudinal (“We worry about expressing doubt or ignorance, being too inquisitive, or asking ‘Why?'”), behavioral (“We fear appearing foolish, making mistakes and looking bad”) and/or thinking (“We are inflexible and rely too much on our biased view of the world”) blocks to creative thinking. Killer phrases such as “Not in the budget”, “The boss won’t go for it”, “A good idea, but…” and “We tried that two years ago and it didn’t work” tend to stop the creativity process in its tracks.

The Simplexity Thinking Process presents teams with a proven and powerful process and essential skill development that overcome the above issues and significantly enhance the odds that teams and entire organizations will innovate. Governments be aware – focusing only on financial incentives without encouraging companies to invest in innovation process and skills is a losing proposition.

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