Malaysia is currently ranked 37th in the Global Innovation Index and is quickly climbing up the rankings. Leaders of enterprise are driving this growth. Following on from our write-up on insights from Singaporean innovation leaders, find below insights from their Malaysian neighbours.

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What is the biggest barrier to corporate innovation you’ve encountered and how did or are you overcoming it?

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Nathanael Noiraud

Founder and CEO, N-Strategy Consulting Services

From my various experiences implementing corporate innovations such as internal organization simplification and improvement, Sales workflow optimisation, new strategy and commercial tools adoption etc. the main barrier has often appeared to be the insufficient onboarding of the team members in the process.Rather than a traditional top-down approach, it is crucial to involve from the early stage the main actors of the upcoming transformation: your team members. As such, I always approach corporate innovation, whether big or small, as a team decision. The coercive approach often proves unsuccessful and generates unnecessary tensions. We often mislabel the lack of consensus and positive team dynamic as a reluctance to change or adapt. It is easier said for a leader that the team is not ready for the change than to insufflate this change by involving the collaborators into the corporate innovation process. From my experience, proceeding with a constructive and teamwork approach not only fosters the support and adoption of the innovation but also contributes to the ongoing improvement of all related processes, leading to better results at individual, team and corporate levels.

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Galia Forouzesh

Digital Strategy & Innovation (Head of Digital), Dentsu Malaysia

We should define innovation in the first place. I personally have faced more than one barrier. The mindset, the fear, the hows and the which way do we go and many more. The digital world is so very dynamic that one minute we think VR is the future the next we are worrying about a particular Facebook ad and whether it has reached enough people to meet the KPI.

So where do we start? Do we look after the current 2018/2019 needs or do we commit resources to coming up with an IoT solution that can change future behaviours?

To overcome these barriers, we start small, innovating within a task or within a mindset, Innovation doesn’t need to be a new embedded system with a brand new chip. Using the tools around us and changing one detail at a time - a significant change of course. It is important to never look back and always thinking about what else we can do and how else can we do it.

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Sean Wong

Director, Digital Innovation, WGroup

Many believe a big barrier to corporate innovation comes from leadership being fearful to try new things. I would instead say most leadership understand the importance of innovation and are instead looking for a pragmatic approach to innovation which minimizes disruptions to the business processes.To me, the biggest barrier to corporate innovation would be achieving total alignment across senior management into what it really means. Having a transformation strategy and bold plans will only go so far without clarity on how it would benefit the people running day to day operations. I find the best way to approach it is to build momentum quickly by identifying quick wins (eg digitizing inefficient processes to improve work experience and unlocking analytics) while consistently addressing the next concerns before they appears in the horizons. This momentum will then enable larger transformation possibilities and higher levels of participation from the organization compared to just pushing it down from the top.

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Leon Jackson

Director of Innovation, Strateq

What is it about corporate culture or realities that stops us from having reinvented ourselves like AirBnB, Uber, Netflix and Amazon? I think the answer is a combination of factors including the following:

• Doing a Kodak - what I mean by this is being caught in a Kodak moment, whereby an addiction to an old business model can make a company miss a chance to develop and invest a new one while there was still an opportunity. Selling film was too lucrative for Kodak that they missed the digital camera opportunity even though they had produced some of the first working technology.
• Not allocating resources to experiment and persevere - since we are trying to define what markets want, it makes sense to experiment. To start with a small area, perhaps do a MVP experiment, or engage a really enthusiastic or passionate group of customers. This is the biggest blunder I see, organisations are so used to working on large 5-10 year blueprints and commitments, that they don’t form separate teams to run experiments and keep collecting data on what works and what does not.
• Having the right mix of talent. You are probably going to be competing with the Startups for talent - so prepare to engage with them like Startups while offering them better benefits for working with an incumbent.

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