Why the need to accelerate innovation?

“No company in the future will be in a position to succeed if it squanders the imagination of its employees.”

Professor Gary Hamel, co-founder of the Management Innovation eXchange (MIX), and the M-Prize: Innovating Innovation Challenge.

Hamel says innovation is one of the most important and difficult challenges facing business around the world.

At the same time, innovation is a vital capability for companies because it is the:

> only insurance against irrelevance
> only antidote to margin-crunching competition
> only way you can out-perform a dismal economy
> only way to build enduring customer loyalty.

Yet, he says, “I don’t think there’s one company in a hundred that makes innovation the work of every single employee, every day.”

He identifies three reasons why organizations aren’t truly innovative, from top to bottom:

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