Breaking Down the Barriers to Innovation

To spur innovation, businesses have spent billions on internal venture capital, incubators, and accelerators. Yet survey after survey indicates these efforts aren’t producing results. Why? Because firms fail to address one major obstacle: the day-to-day habits and routines that regularly stifle innovation. These include such things as poorly run meetings, no slack capacity, few opportunities to speak up, and the notion that doing things differently is inefficient and costly.

Fortunately, it’s possible to hack this problem, using interventions called BEANs, combinations of behavioral enablers, artifacts, and nudges that break down the innovation blockers. Behavior enablers are tools or processes that make it easier for people to do something differently. Artifacts, which you can see or touch, support the new behavior. Nudges promote it through indirect suggestion and reinforcement.

In this article the authors describe a variety of BEANs that the bank DBS, the Tata Group, and other companies have devised to unleash innovation. They also explain how any organization can go about creating its own BEANs by identifying the creative behaviors it wants, examining what’s getting in the way, and then brainstorming ways to bust those bad habits.