Strategic and organizational factors are what separate successful big-company innovators from the rest of the field. A McKinsey Quarterly article.

"The best way to predict the future is to create it," says leadership guru Peter Drucker.
The relevance of modern artists is measured to a great degree by their ability to refresh aesthetic concepts and innovate. Many artists who are now seen as cultural leaders created the future through breakthrough work, starting with the 16th century innovator and artist, Leonardo da Vinci, through to Damien Hirst, the most successful artist of our own time.

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How can you create a culture of innovation to drive long-term growth? Representatives from leading business schools Henley, Warwick, Cass and INSEAD discuss the value of innovation and the skills you need to develop

In my first article in this series, I talked about the continued, and often misplaced, focus of corporate innovation leaders on developing disruptive innovation efforts. My basic argument within the article was the while “Big I” innovation can be a valid driver of growth. However, few companies are in the right position or have laid the appropriate groundwork to support and develop new, groundbreaking ideas, especially in the context of the existing organizational culture.
In this article I want to talk about the value of incremental innovation and why companies should often focus on this, rather than driving as hard as they can to come up with the next breakthrough product or service. Incremental improvements aren’t always cool, but over time they can drive significant business results.

Since innovation is a complex, company-wide endeavor, it requires a set of crosscutting practices and processes to structure, organize, and encourage it. Taken together, the essentials described in this article constitute just such an operating system, as seen in Exhibit 2. These often overlapping, iterative, and nonsequential practices resist systematic categorization but can nonetheless be thought of in two groups. The first four, which are strategic and creative in nature, help set and prioritize the terms and conditions under which innovation is more likely to thrive. The next four essentials deal with how to deliver and organize for innovation repeatedly over time and with enough value to contribute meaningfully to overall performance.

These seven behaviors threaten to stop innovation dead in its tracks.

The human body serves as the perfect metaphor for understanding the innovation challenge facing today's organizations. The body is built to adapt and respond to demands that are placed upon it. The greater the demand, the stronger the response. If you and your organization are going to thrive in this world you must build and keep your innovation muscles strong. We know that only the fittest survive.
Unfortunately, too many organizations suffer from overweight bureaucracies, which crush employee enthusiasm and creativity. Rather than seizing on high potential opportunities and championing a bright future, they procrastinate and deny market realities. These out-of-shape organizations find themselves falling behind on a quarterly basis because they are unable to think differently, decide quickly, and collaborate effectively. They are simply not fit enough to successfully compete and win in today’s fast paced global economy.

No single innovation tool or method will deliver consistent, profitable breakthroughs, and neither will a hodgepodge of misaligned or poorly integrated practices. It takes a systematic approach to build a systemic capability—whether that is Amazon’s logistics prowess or the near-flawless service you receive as a guest at a Four Seasons hotel. So it is with innovation. Skills, tools, met­rics, processes, platforms, incentives, roles, and values all have to come together in one supercharged, all-wheel-drive, race-winning innovation machine.

So what are the parts of the innovation engine that most often get left out? Here’s our list of the top five: