How much time do you dedicate to innovation and new ideas?

Our reader poll today asks: How much time per month do you dedicate to innovation and generating new ideas?

– A significant amount (3-5 days/month): 20%
– A moderate amount (1-2 days/month): 20%
– A small amount (2-4 hours/month): 36%
– Almost none: 24%

Some of you are spending substantial time on innovation. Whether that’s new products, processes, services or operational efficiencies, your task is to ensure you don’t end up with a bloated idea pipeline with little prioritization or execution. Be rigorous in chasing the biggest ideas and focusing on those to the exclusion of the others. For those of you not dedicating enough time to innovation, you can’t compete forever that way. It’s not much to carve out 5-10% of your time every month to look at your organization through new lenses and come up with ideas for improvement. Get your heads out of the status reports, dashboards and daily operations and spend a little time thinking about the future — your competitors are.

Do you agree with these poll results?  Let us know in the comments below!

– Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC

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These results were originally a SmartPulse poll in SmartBrief on Leadership which tracks feedback from more than 190,000 business leaders. Get smarter on leadership and sign up for the SmartBrief on Leadership e-newsletter.