Legal hurdles, slow procurement, endless discussions: Real-life experience with some common blockers that kill innovation.

The business world is still full of talkers who talk, rather than doers who do: If you don’t want to do something, there is always a way out by initiating a huge discussion.

Take this discussion one level up: The world is still full of talkers who talk, rather than innovators who innovate.

There are tons of innovative people around who are ready to innovate, but they can’t.

Not because they are lazy or because they initiate huge discussions.

But because they meet administrative roadblocks that slow down or even make innovation impossible.

Here are some examples.

Enemy #1: Lawyers

Lawyers are on a mission to cover every possible risk and event in the contracts they draft. That’s why I am usually getting very impatient with them.

Do you know why? Innovation will produce failures, but not in the areas that you know upfront. So it’s just easier to accept that things will go wrong, rather than to find hundreds of potential risks and threats that will not happen anyway.

If you’re not failing, you’re not innovating.

In the military, we say that no plan survives the first shot. It’s the same with a contract. I dare say that most court cases are not about things that are written down in a lengthy contract, but rather about things that weren’t foreseen.

So we’d rather get on with innovation and solve the problems if and when they occur.

A nice example of why this is the right approach is a geothermal energy project in my home country Switzerland. 150M CHF of public funds were invested into this lighthouse project, with no clear expected outcome. 83% of the population voted in favor of this project, despite the uncertainties. And some 7 years later, the project failed, leaving only the learnings but not the expected benefits.

More tangible and occurring much more frequently, try raising funds for a startup company. People think that the hardest part is to get investors to commit. It’s true, getting to yes is hard. But don’t forget that after the commitments, you need to factor in enough time to prepare all the investment agreements, exercise notes, board resolutions, auditor reports, lock accounts, and many more.

Try to get the paperwork done before you run out of cash. How I love paperwork.

Enemy #2: Procurement

Like legal departments, procurement departments were founded with good intentions. Their mission is to prevent your incapable cousin from supplying sub-standard and overpriced goods and services to your company.

Very often, procurement departments team up with legal departments and find ways why procurement cannot go ahead — not due to pricing issues, but due to various reasons such as compliance, internal policies, etc.

Often in my career, procurement delayed a decision by more than one year after the final offer was handed in. In an innovative, fast-moving world, your product might have changed significantly during this period. And if you’re unlucky, procurement will tell you at the end of the process that you will have to deliver exactly what you offered over one year ago. Even if your product has improved in the meantime.

Enemy #3: Time

I’m not saying that the world should work without agreed rules. Therefore, legal and procurement departments are a necessity in a rule-based world.

However, the more you discuss legal and procurement matters, the longer it takes to agree. Administration takes the room you give it. And let’s face it, legal and procurement matters are never core business. They’re administration.

Always remember that it’s better to have a good solution in time, rather than the perfect solution too late.

And being too late for innovators often means being dead.