Check out this great piece by Lisa Kay Solomon, Professor of Design Strategy, Coauthor of Moments of Impact: How to Design Strategic Conversations That Accelerate Change on why innovation isn’t always a priority in big corporations:

Innovation is hard. As an organization, it’s easy to proclaim, “we want to be more innovative,” but it’s very hard to put into practice. There are three majors reasons for this. First, most organizations are focused on short term results — quarterly earnings, monthly sales numbers, weekly or daily profit or loyalty metrics. Innovation often takes a along time to incubate and nurture. It doesn’t operate on a measurable timeframe like well-defined products and markets.

Second, innovation often requires senior leadership support and the involvement of many different functions across the organization (sales, marketing, engineering, legal, finance, business intelligence, and others). These departments often have their own agendas, budgets and priorities, which makes it difficult to carve out the necessary time to truly collaborate to bring a new idea to market. Big companies are also a breeding ground for unproductive politics to slow down decisions related to securing extra time or funding for these new initiatives.

Full piece here.