Obstacles To Innovation In The Colombian Manufacturing And Services Sectors

Development is a process of transforming a country’s economic structure towards the production and export of more complex products. A society’s capacity to generate and assimilate technological shifts has become acknowledged as a central contributory factor to prosperity.In this research proposal, we argue that the Colombian public innovation policy has been formulated with an excessively strong focus on financial and organisational aspects neglecting other relevant factors. Obstacles to innovation traditionally have been studied as external factors to individuals and organizations e.g. rare support of public institutions, inadequate macroeconomic policy, deficient educational systems, etc. However, there are other non-traditional issues such as basic constraints to create successful innovation, which stem in large part from several inhibiting factors like the inability to unlearn obsolete mental models or, put simply, the resistance to change.We thus propose two questions that encapsulate the essence of our research proposal:•What are the factors that impinge the process of developing the innovation capability?•How to generate new routines in a smart way as to make innovation part of the DNA of the organization?

Development is a process of transforming a country’s economic structure towards the production and export of more complex products. A society’s capacity to generate and assimilate technological shifts has become acknowledged as a central contributory factor to prosperity.In this research proposal, we argue that the Colombian public innovation policy has been formulated with an excessively strong focus on financial and organisational aspects neglecting other relevant factors. Obstacles to innovation traditionally have been studied as external factors to individuals and organizations e.g. rare support of public institutions, inadequate macroeconomic policy, deficient educational systems, etc. However, there are other non-traditional issues such as basic constraints to create successful innovation, which stem in large part from several inhibiting factors like the inability to unlearn obsolete mental models or, put simply, the resistance to change.We thus propose two questions that encapsulate the essence of our research proposal:•What are the factors that impinge the process of developing the innovation capability?•How to generate new routines in a smart way as to make innovation part of the DNA of the organization?

Technological innovation, obstacles to innovation, Oslo Manual, Industry sector, Services sector, Colombia.