There is a wide gap between the innovation goals of business leaders and their ability to execute those goals.

According to McKinsey research, over 70% of senior executives revealed that innovation will be one of the top three drivers of growth for their companies in the next three to five years. Yet most of these leaders admit disappointment in their ability to stimulate innovation within their organizations. More

IBM’s 2010 global survey of 1,500 CEO’s reported that leaders believe in creativity as the basis for “disruptive innovation and continuous re-invention. Leaders must be ready to upset the status quo even if it is successful. They must be comfortable with and committed to ongoing experimentation.”

Innovation will require the associative fluency, creative problem solving, intuitive organizational skills and pattern recognition possessed by divergent thinkers. More

Business leaders consider strategy planning as one of their main responsibilities, and spend significant company time on formal, annual strategic planning initiatives.

According to McKinsey and Co., however, "the extraordinary reality is that few executives think this time-consuming process pays off, and many CEOs complain that their strategic-planning process yields few new ideas and is often fraught with politics." More

The literature on corporate culture upholds the idea that national cultures predict firm innovativeness around the globe.

However, new research shows that, in the current environment, corporate culture proves to be more important than these traditional country drivers in predicting radical innovation in firms across nations. More