What do you do in your spare time? Do you have spare time? How do you come up with new ideas?
” No slack: In the last decade, many companies have become obsessed with becoming lean, with wringing all of the slack out of their operations and processes. The problem is that when you wring all of the slack out of a company, you wring out the innovation as well. “While the folks in R&D and new product development are given time to innovate, most employees don’t enjoy this luxury. Every day brings a barrage of e-mails, voice mails and back-to-back meetings. In this world, where the need to be ‘responsive’ fragments human attention into a thousand tiny shards, there is no ‘thinking time.’ And therein lies the problem. However creative your colleagues may be, if they don’t have the right to occasionally abandon their post and work on something that’s not mission-critical, most of their creativity will remain dormant.” This points to the depth of cultural change that must take place in order for innovation to take hold in a large organization. It’s not enough to just “bolt on” an idea management system; if employees don’t even have time to think creatively, how can they come up with breakthrough ideas to populate such idea repositories?”
Three impediment to innovation by Innovation Blog