Innovation Made Easier in 2025

It´s so difficult to innovate - How many times have we heard this statement from the companies we worked for or from our clients? Or that ‘people resist change.’ It is a pervasive problem that Kasia Hein-Peters is reflecting in this article. She is a licensed innovation management practitioner and partner in the North America Chapter of Healthcare Shapers. 
The challenges and risks of innovating are real, and yet it is always riskier not to innovate. Developing and implementing innovative solutions is critical for organizations to remain competitive and adapt to rapidly changing markets. 2025 has just started and one of the New Year’s resolutions could be to tackle main obstacles preventing us from innovating better and faster.

Key Challenges to Innovate and How to Remove Them

Misalignment Between Business and Innovation Strategy

It is not uncommon for companies to have their innovation team separated from the enterprise strategy team. Consequently, innovation efforts are not aligned with the organization's strategy, leading to scattered innovation projects and lowering future business impact. 
The solution is to merge both strategies by applying the same process and starting with the PESTLED analysis of the marker forces, which leads to scenario planning. Scenario planning is the best way to envision plausible futures and prepare the company for them. As a result, the innovation pipeline will be aligned with the selected scenarios. 
Companies that plan their strategies based on scenarios are more resilient and generate better growth over the years.

Gaps in Innovation Capabilities

Even the best strategy will not be realized if an organization lacks innovation capabilities. It happens that a company doesn't have innovation capabilities at all, but more often, there is a mix of strengths and weaknesses. When assessing innovation capabilities, the following aspects should be considered:

• Is the company's offering innovative and differentiated? The assessment includes the products, platforms, and services and their value propositions.
• Does the sales process support the innovative offer? The main areas of analysis are gathering customer insights, customer experience, customer engagement, and value capture.
• What about the organization itself and how it fosters innovation? This category includes processes, organization structure, learning capabilities, and supply chain.
• Is the approach to the ecosystem innovative? The analysis of channels, market linkages, open innovation, and the strength of the brand will answer this question. 

Companies striving to grow should not have serious weaknesses. Building from strengths and addressing weaknesses is necessary if the company wants to grow sustainably and be highly profitable.  
 

Gaps in Understanding Market Forces

If the market assessment is always done by the same group of people or just the C-Suite, a company may miss emerging trends that are happening at the periphery. When the emerging trends become mainstream, a company may realize it has already lost to more savvy competitors. 
Technology advances allow us to gather the PESTLED analysis online from a very diverse group of stakeholders, internal and external. PESTLED stands for political, economic, societal, technological, legal, environmental, and demographic factors and can be categorized into positive, negative, or both based on their impact on the organization. But the most important insight is to group market trends into certain, already occurring, and uncertain, just emerging. Certain market trends must be accepted and included in the strategic plan. However, the uncertain trends are the basis for building future scenarios, as described in the paragraph above.
AI-enabled online tools help cluster multiple inputs and, therefore, allow for crowdsourcing market assessments from more stakeholders than ever before, making them more robust.

Innovation Blockers

Several aspects of a company's culture, organization, or processes could become barriers to innovation. The most common are:

• Working in silos, which hinders knowledge sharing and collaboration
• Fear of failure or uncertainty, preventing risk-taking, and delaying decisions
• Lack of purpose or no faith in the project objectives, resulting in low morale and lack of motivation
• Strong hierarchy leads to fear of sharing opinions and killing creativity
• Strong bureaucracy resulting in slow decision-making and delays 

It is not easy to change the culture overnight. However, there are ways to improve it by increasing inclusivity and ensuring the cross-functional composition of innovation task forces. Management is responsible for developing a long-term, inspiring company mission and vision, incentivizing open communication, and optimizing processes.

If innovation IQ of a company is mediocre, so is its performance. 

How to Move Forward

Sustainable growth requires innovation competencies, a process, governance, and systems. Only a systematic and inclusive approach can enhance creativity, help select the right ideas to move forward, test and develop them into offers, and successfully commercialize them. 
Newly updated international standards ISO56000:2025 (2) provide a pathway for any company to become a better innovator, and there are methods, like INNOVATION360 (3), which are fully aligned with these standards. 
One of the ways to acquire innovative capabilities is an annual learning program in the format of a planner, available on Amazon – the Innovation Planner 2025 (1). In addition to monthly and weekly calendars to track innovation projects, it offers short articles, exercises, and links to free online courses on various aspects of innovation management. 

With the start of 2025, make successful innovation your New Year's resolution!

Sources

1. Innovation Planner 2025: Book with Future-Ready Tools Strategies and Skills
2. ISO 56000:2025: Innovation management — Fundamentals and vocabulary, Edition 2, 2025
3. INNOVATION360 , Portal for professional online tools, education, and certifications for innovation, transformation and growth.