Although many companies are keen on generating new ideas, there is a more important skill – one that involves asking better questions. Albert Einstein reputedly said, ‘If I had an hour to save the world, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute finding solutions.’ From my perspective, most organisations spend 60 minutes of their time finding solutions to problems that just don’t matter.

This is why many innovation efforts fail. Too much energy is invested in projects that are not real value-creators. If you spend time defining the real problems, challenges, and opportunities for your organisation, you will massively accelerate your innovation efforts.

All companies have challenges. They can be technical challenges on how to create a particular chemical compound. They can be marketing challenges on how to best describe your product to increase market share. They can be HR challenges around improving employee engagement. Where do you find these challenges? You can find them anywhere – from customers, employees, shareholders, consultants, suppliers, competitors, and the list goes on.

Clearly, organisations have no shortage of challenges. And some of the most important challenges to solve are hard to spot because of organisational blind spots and assumption making.

The meta-challenge for all organisations is to find which challenges, when solved, will create the greatest value. Given that organisations have limited resources and money, setting priorities is critical. Therefore, the first step in creating a culture of innovation is to look for, identify, and organise challenges. And then you must become skilled at valuing, ranking, and framing these challenges.

Think of your innovation portfolio much like you would handle a financial investment portfolio. You want some safe bets (incremental innovation) and some riskier investments (radical innovation). You also want varied innovations ranging from technical challenges to marketing challenges, and service challenges to performance-improvement challenges.

Of course, you only create value when you find and implement solutions. Therefore, framing the challenge is only the first step. But as Einstein noted, if you take time to define your challenges properly, you will be able to find workable solutions more easily.

Innovation is not about one-time change; it is about continual and sustainable change. And an organisation’s ability to change hinges on its ability to continually identify its most pressing challenges.

My mantra is this: when the pace of change outside your organisation is faster than the pace within, you will be out of business. As today’s pace of change is crazier than ever, a culture of innovation, when done right, can give you a leg up in an evolving marketplace.