Introduction

Creative People Must Be Stopped!

Given that a search on the term “innovation” returns more than forty thousand book entries on Amazon.com, does the world really need another book on the topic? Maybe the better question is Why do so many organizations continue to kill good ideas and fail in their innovation attempts despite this wealth of research and advice?

Innovation is a natural and desirable outcome of human interaction, yet it is systematically stopped in organizations, often by the very people who say they want it and who stand to benefit from it. I term these systematic stoppages innovation constraints.

Over the course of ten years of research, teaching, and consulting, I have identified the six dominant types of constraints that can keep creative new ideas from being formulated, developed into marketable products and services, or adopted by the intended users. This book organizes these innovation killers into a conceptual framework that demystifies what innovation is, how it happens, and how we stop it without even trying. In my executive programs, workshops, talks, and consulting engagements, thousands of managers, executives, and innovators have successfully used the framework to diagnose the primary causes of innovation failure in their organizations and to develop strategies for overcoming them. My goal in this book is to bring this ....