While attending the ISPIM Asia-Pacific Innovation Forum 2014 in Singapore a few weeks ago, I participated in a roundtable discussion led by Dr. Rajiv Narvekar of Tata Management Training Center, India, with the intriguing topic: “Are executives suffering from innovation fatigue? What can be done to enhance the effectiveness of innovation workshops?”

Dumbfounded, I thought: “Innovation fatigue? How can one ever get tired of innovation?” After all, carefully planned and well-run innovation events elicit feelings of joy, eager anticipation and excitement in delegates who can partake in them. Well, after actively contributing to the roundtable discussion, and linking it back to my former experiences as a competitive runner, I got a better grasp of the underlying causes of innovation fatigue, and some ideas for potential cures of the problem.

What is innovation fatigue?

We may define innovation fatigue as a lessening in one’s response to, and enthusiasm for, innovation, typically as a result of overexposure to innovation initiatives. As a senior executive or innovation manager, you will know that your organization has been killing your staff’s enthusiasm for innovation if your managers and employees approach a new innovation initiative with a sense of lethargy or boredom — or even worse, dread. Clearly, something has gone wrong with your good intentions to promote innovation in your company, but what?

What causes innovation fatigue?

“Everything is connected with everything else,” noted Leonardo da Vinci. So why don’t we connect the issue of innovation fatigue to the world of competitive running?

If you’re a runner who’s competing in too many races over a season, you will sooner or later lose your winning edge: You tire physically and mentally as you don’t have enough time to recuperate. You are more likely to pick up an injury or to make tactical mistakes during the race. In any case, the more races you run, the more you lose your competitive edge, and the poorer your results are likely to become. In short: Competing in too many races in a season results in excessive fatigue, a dip in race performance, and eventually injuries or even burnout.

Likewise, innovation fatigue may be produced by running too many innovation initiatives in a given time period. The problem is amplified if the innovation events don’t deliver the hoped-for results due to a lack of preparation, involving the wrong people, poor scheduling, and over-demanding performance expectations. Let’s briefly look at each of these factors:

• Insufficient preparation: A runner first trains before competing in a challenging race. Likewise, employees who have already been trained in how to think more creatively and systematically perform better in a real-life innovation project workshop.
• Wrong people: People may develop innovation fatigue if you invite the wrong people to the event (e.g., people who are more efficiency-focused rather than innovation-focused) or — even worse — if you hire the wrong innovation facilitators.
• Timing: Both in innovation and running, fatigue sets in if you schedule too many events in too short of a time.
• Unrealistic expectations: Do you expect a novice runner to win the first competitive race? Likewise, don’t expect people whom you sent to their first innovation training to come up with Earth-shaking ideas that solve the most pressing problems of your business.

Who is to blame for the causes of innovation fatigue?

Let’s face it: one source of innovation fatigue is “innovation experts” who lack experience and expertise. Becoming an international expert in any domain requires you to invest about 10,000 hours of dedicated and disciplined work in the field. That’s 8 years of working for five hours each workday of the year in a highly focused, concentrated way on issues related to your field. Moreover, persistently putting in that many work hours typically requires you to be deeply passionate about your chosen domain, and that you possess a talent for it.

With the advent of the innovation economy, many marketers, consultants and trainers have jumped on the innovation bandwagon and relabeled themselves as “innovation experts” without having put in the necessary hours to truly become an expert in the field — and lacking the natural talent and desire as well as discipline and patience to gradually move from novice, apprentice, practitioner, master to eventually become a genuine innovation expert.

By failing to separate the wheat from the chaff and hiring such fake innovation experts, corporate decision-makers produce innovation fatigue, too. They may fall for promises of fast and sizeable ROI improvements or a 100% success guarantee in an innovation project (which only non-experts claim to produce, as there is always a degree of uncertainty involved in even the most structured innovation approaches); or they simply hire non-experts because they want to get innovation experts on the cheap. Well, as David Ogilvy said: “Pay peanuts, get monkeys.”

In this connection, corporate decision-makers also contribute to innovation fatigue because they want to get too much out of a single innovation event (such as, “We want you to train our people to get more creative and innovative, and we want them to produce ideas for a challenge that we face, so that we can implement those ideas right away. But better do it fast and make it cheap.”).

How to cure innovation fatigue?

Here are five tips to prevent innovation fatigue before it affects your organization:

1. Carefully plan your innovation initiatives for the year: Spread your initiatives or events out, thereby avoiding scheduling conflicts with other organizational priorities (e.g., budgeting), and don’t overload.
2. Focus on one target result at a time. In planning your innovation workshops, notice the important difference between an innovation training and project. An innovation training centers on learning and human capital development of your people. In contrast, an innovation project focuses on the direct production of tangible innovation deliverables and immediate results; innovation project workshops are more complex and resource intensive and typically cost much more than innovation training.
   Resist the temptation to mix innovation training with projects, or you get neither good learning nor good results. It’s like a competitive runner aiming to race for both record and title in a championship race — you’re likely to end up losing both.

3. First train; then apply the training. Start training your employees in the know-how of systematic innovation, and thereafter let them apply the learned contents in a real-life project.
4. Work with genuine, experienced innovation experts who have put in the hours to hone their domain expertise and also have a natural affinity for creativity and innovation. Note that most genuine innovation experts worked hard for years to develop their own original innovation methods, and need to amortize these development costs. So resist the temptation to press them for discounts, and pay them the professional fee they ask for and deserve.
5. Track your progress, but don’t obsess over short-term results: Innovation takes time and typically doesn’t show results overnight. While a sales training or focused sales initiatives may translate into measurable results in the short run (say a year’s time), many innovation initiatives bear their fruits only in the medium run (say, 2–4 years). More often than not, it takes several months or even years of persistent work before a new product is shipped or a new service is launched.

© Dr. Detlef Reis 2015. This article was published in parallel in the Bangkok Post under the same title on 8 January 2015.