12 Cartoons That Explain Why Innovation Is So Darned Hard

A selection of my cartoons to do with innovation (more on my personal blog here!). Feel free to use in presentations, etc…. (let me know on twitter: @timoelliott)

Funnily enough, there’s a strong correlation between how long people have been in a company / how senior they are and how reluctant they are to embrace change: 

But innovators shouldn’t neglect the real human costs — not everybody is willing and/or able to change..

Most organizations try to have it both ways — innovation without actually changing anything — and that’s as dumb as it sounds:

To get good innovation ideas, you may have to change to a different environment (how about a Design Thinking Workshop with SAP?)

The best way to get ideas is to shake things up — and invite others, with different points of view, to take part (alternatively, these folks are working on their IT agility…)

Innovation these days is less about new or better products and services, and more about changing business models — which is hard to do because it cross existing company silos, so many organizations leave it until too late:

Let’s face it, most of us feel like we’re too busy to get around to innovating — but there’s never a better time to do it than right now:

What’s stopping us from innovating? Complexity! 

And remember, many people’s jobs are tied up with that complexity — they’re not going to be happy to have you “save them” from it:

Sadly, many corporate bureaucracies manage to kill off new ideas before they get going:

In a rapidly changing world, the only way to guarantee failure is to not try. Don’t run a business, run an experiment.