In today’s dynamic and globalized economy, large Corporations continue to face threat from disruptive innovation from new and unknown start-ups in many diverse industries.   Corporations are facing disruption in market segments such as New Media, Technology, Green Energy, electric cars, or even more traditional and stable ones including banking, airlines, telecom, mining or transportation. Nimble start-ups have developed new products, services or business models to disrupt that market segment and become a dominant player in it.  Corporations have recently focused on building in-house corporate innovation sills in order to remain competitive. They have also tried to inculcate a spirit of entrepreneurship (intrapreneurship) across the company to aggressively combat those agile start-ups.

Despite these significant efforts, many corporations continue to face significant challenges in enabling a corporate culture of innovation. The primary challenge for most corporations continues to be the development of internal skills focused on innovation.  Most courses on innovation focus only on the content and do not take into account the factors inhibiting corporate innovation. These include factors such as fear of cannibalization, structural obstacles to invention, desire for predictable and consistent results, personnel risk/reward incentives, and lack of team-based innovation learning and development. The last factor is especially critical as most often, individuals rather than cross-disciplinary teams are given innovation-oriented goals.  

Corporations can overcome these challenges by focussing on a business focused innovation certification.  Such an innovation certification has more to offer to a corporate organization than just the actual content of the certification.  A Business Innovation Certification should have corporate focus by answering questions such as how to sell your ideas in a corporate environment? It should also detail strategies for gaining adoption and sponsorship in a corporation by aligning ideas with overall business objectives.  Another key to the success of such a business innovation certification is to enable an intrapreneurship culture in an organization where individuals learn to be persistent yet flexible.  Such a certification should also have a team-based approach to certification projects with senior management as corporate mentors for the certification.  Finally, the certification should lead to membership of global community of passionate innovators entrepreneurs who can add value to each other’s endeavours.

By following this approach, corporations can unleash the potential of internal innovation by enabling their employees to become Innovation Heroes who can lead them into the next wave of organic corporate growth and success across the world.