Australia scared of innovation: IBM

Australian organisations fear innovation as being too risky, expensive and time-consuming, if a new study commissioned by IBM is to be believed.

Big Blue found that while local companies view innovation as central to the success of an organisation, more than half of them believe they are too conservative to be innovative.

Close to half the survey’s respondents did not think that Australian companies were investing enough to allow innovation, while more than a quarter felt they did not have enough time to innovate.

IBM A/NZ director of strategy and marketing, Megan Dalla-Camina, said in a statement that the study reflected the fact that people continued to equate innovation with R&D.

“The real value [of innovation] lies in… extending innovation to services, business processes, business models, and even to an organisation’s management and culture, or, if we consider Australia as a whole, to policy and society,” she said.

The study also found that some 61 percent of respondents believed that Australia was less innovative than other countries and that 79 percent believed that smaller organisations were more innovative than larger organisations.

IBM’s research was conducted online this month with 300 professionals from companies of more than 50 employees across education, technology, government, banking and finance verticals participating.