6 Common Challenges in Innovation Management Leaders Face in 2025

Innovation challenges are everywhere! In a recent survey conducted at an innovation management event, leaders were asked what innovation challenges they face in the workplace. The results reveal key hurdles that you should be aware of as you move your innovation management strategies into 2025.

From the automotive industry to healthcare and telecommunications, these six innovation challenges are based on 140+ comments from Managers, Innovation Coaches, Heads of Technology, and more.

The common innovation challenges discussed in this guide revolve around implementing effective innovation portfolio strategies, driving a culture of innovation, AI, measuring the value of innovation, and many other topics — let’s jump right into this, shall we?

Innovation Challenge Table Summary

In a busy world, our content should be two things, easy to read, and quick to digest. That’s why we’ve summarized this entire list of innovation challenges in a simple table format below.

Challenge #1: Delivering Innovation Portfolio Management

Managing a single innovation project is one thing, but an entire innovation portfolio? That’s a different kettle of fish! It also poses a difficult question on prioritization. How do you balance quick wins with high-impact, long-term innovation projects?

An Executive Vice President and leading innovator from this survey on innovation management challenges sums up this concern with the following comment…

“One of our key innovation challenges is managing our innovation portfolio and ensuring we focus on the right projects. We’ve identified many great opportunities across our vast product offerings but prioritizing them effectively is a challenge.”

So, how can organizations implement effective practices and tools that align with their strategic goals? Is there a way to balance those swift wins with future-focused opportunities? Of course, there is!

Develop a Balanced Innovation Portfolio

First and foremost, innovation portfolio management can support quick wins and long-term investments with a balanced approach. For example, your organization could adopt a strategy where 70% of ideas offer incremental improvements and 30% of ideas are innovative and disruptive.

Like most things in life, never put all your eggs in one basket. By spreading your team’s focus across different ideas with smaller and bigger wins, you’ll enjoy sustainable innovation portfolio management.

Establish a Criteria for Prioritizing Innovation

Creating solid criteria for prioritizing innovation can be powerful. It ensures your entire team is aware of what’s important, and what’s less significant as you navigate hundreds of new ideas and opportunities. Your criteria should include an evaluation of innovation projects and their associated benefits, risks, time-to-market, resource needs, and strategic fit. Within your wider innovation portfolio management, criterion is a must.

With edison365, our customizable triage sliders allow your workforce to evaluate new ideas together, ultimately resulting in a better sense of direction and focus. What’s more, you can include external subject matter experts in this analysis.

Invest in Project Portfolio Management Software

Managing projects of any nature can be difficult, especially an entire portfolio. Yet, it doesn’t have to be a constant headache! There are dozens of great tools and platforms out there to support the innovation lifecycle.
Whether it’s Monday.com for extensive project management, Asana for innovation task management, or edison365 for end-to-end innovation portfolio management. Find a platform that automates certain tasks and processes and makes life easier!

Innovation Challenge #2: Building a Culture of Innovation

Building a culture of innovation doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a long-term investment that pays dividends for your innovation management strategy. See, creating a culture of innovation is one of the winning approaches used by some of the most forward-thinking and successful companies.

Think Apple, Amazon, Tesla, and others, who have invested enormously in building a culture of innovation. These organizations are major players in shaping their industries and bringing fresh ideas to the table all the time.

This innovation management challenge was presented by a Director of New Business from the survey, who said “One key challenge of our company is the establishment of an innovation culture. We have an innovation process but it’s not working. Fewer ideas, wrong ideas, bad execution.

This is a very common innovation management challenge and poses a threat to progress in 2025. Let’s look at a couple of ways in which this Director can address building a culture of innovation, from gamification to mid-management buy-in.

Gamify Innovation for Wider Employee Engagement

Gamified innovation is a very powerful tool. It’s the foundation of many everyday apps people can’t put down. From Duolingo to Todoist, these apps offer streaks and points earned with more time spent using their products.

Similarly, edison365 users participate in gamified innovation leaderboards, along with reward and recognition features. These help leaders develop an engaged workforce that drives new ideas and an innovation culture.

But you don’t need edison365 to drive gamified innovation. You can create a rewards program or physical leaderboard of your own. Put simply, find a way to make ideation and innovation management fun, and you’ll never be short of success!

Gain Mid-Management Buy-in to Create an Innovation Culture

It’s not just gamification that can help develop a culture of innovation. It’s receiving buy-in from mid-management colleagues. This pool of employees has a lot of influence and decision power, and once convinced, can help steer the culture ship.

Deliver the pitch of a lifetime on why innovation benefits your organization and helps reach business goals. With their influence, you will be leapfrogging the hurdles organizations face as they strive to create a culture of innovation.

Challenge #3: Leveraging AI and Emerging Tech

It’s no secret that AI has taken the world by storm. From profession to profession, industry to industry, in late 2025 the number of use cases for AI will skyrocket. In some respects, AI has become pivotal to streamlining processes and systems around innovation, productivity, and more.

So, despite increased accessibility to AI tools, innovation challenges still remain around using AI and emerging tech. Let’s take a look at some solutions, and what leaders can do in the coming months.

Utilize AI-driven Collaboration Tools for Innovation Management

Despite AI being relatively new, many innovation management tools have adopted AI features to help automate tasks, summarize data, and generate reports. This is likely your best course of action to adopt AI into the innovation mix.

Look for tools that are specifically built for innovation management instead of generic GenAI instruments like ChatGPT or Gemini. Please Where AI can integrate with wider innovation features for a seamless experience all in one platform.

Educate Your Team Through AI Innovation Workshops

Another great way to tackle this innovation management challenge is through workshops and learning programs. You must be onboarding new employees who either possess the skills and knowledge to use AI or are willing to learn about it!

Whether it’s hands-on demos or AI training programs, your workforce should be able to identify the key benefits that AI offers their day-to-day workflows, from increasing productivity to supporting wider decision-making, automating manual tasks, and aiding creativity.

Challenge #4: Measuring the Value of Innovation

Believe it or not, many leaders still struggle to measure the value of innovation. Understanding the positive impacts or shortcomings of innovation is important. It guides your efforts, helps you reassess your strategy, and ensures your team is heading in the right direction. So, how can managers overcome this innovation challenge?

Identify “Success Gates” for Innovation

Innovation must move through a pipeline, from stage to stage through to fruition. By setting specific success gates for innovation to pass through (in other words, key metrics for each stage) you can ensure valuable innovation is achieved.

For instance, at an ideation stage, a sound success gate might be ‘Concept validation’. Once this has been achieved, you might move on to prototyping as the next success metric, through to market readiness, scalability, and more.

These are all essential checkpoints that help measure success from stage to stage. Ensuring innovation is adding value and driving results!

Establish Dual Metrics for Innovation

When defining and measuring innovation, it’s important to think both short and long-term. Set KPIs that reflect this. For instance, look for metrics that track immediate measurable outcomes such as time-to-market, cost savings, or incremental revenue.

When it comes to long-term metrics, things like market share growth and brand perception help you evaluate the impact of innovation projects. Identifying these dual metrics makes it easier to translate results at every stage into something assessable.

Innovation Challenge #5: Balancing Execution with Innovation

Balancing execution and other priorities with innovation can be difficult. Ideas need space to grow, and ideation can eat into your team’s time. With a few changes, however, you can ensure innovation is less of a balancing act and fits into a robust, rounded strategy.

Introduce “Innovation Time”

If there’s one thing the most innovative brands all do it’s allocating time to innovate. Take Google for example, they are a frontier in technology and one of the most well-established names in the world. Just about everyone has used Google at some point in their life!

But brands like Google often empower their people by setting specific days or time periods for innovation activities. This highlights their emphasis on being innovative and tells the workforce that innovation is a high priority. With Google, their “20% time” policy means employees can spend time on things that could benefit the company, with both Gmail and Google News as products of this strategy.

So, for your business? Find a time each week, month, or quarter to allocate to innovative activities. Taken innovation sprints, brainstorming sessions, and cross-functional collaboration as options. Perhaps invite your team into the decision-making around this. Most importantly, though, make sure its three things:

• Practical and results-driven.
• Fits within the work schedule.
• Engaging employees.

Make Idea Submission Easy to Accomplish

One of the many reasons employers never receive ground-breaking ideas from people is due to process complexity. Sometimes, submitting an idea requires an outdated system or intranet that isn’t user-friendly. The results? Well, there is none!

See, complexity hinders organizations from capturing great ideas and encouraging creative problem-solving among employees. The solution is a platform or tool that makes ideation simple. With edison365, users can create challenges based on key business objectives or hurdles.

Users can then submit ideas quickly, and easily in just a few moments. These are then documented in our cloud-based solution for stakeholders to review. It’s as simple as that. No clunky tools, lost data, or idea-less teams.

If you don’t necessarily want innovation management software, it’s important to remember that ‘Suggestion boxes’ are very underused, lacking the impact expected. Instead, try to utilize free tools like Google Docs, Sheets, and collaborative tools like Mural for ideation.

Innovation Challenge #6: Fostering Innovation-oriented Leaders

One of the key innovation challenges organizations face is creating innovation-focused leaders. This lack of innovation skillsets and know-how in senior positions makes it harder to encourage an innovative spirit into the wider workforce! Luckily, we have a few ways to tackle this innovation challenge.

Innovation Leadership Training Programs

First thing’s first, training! By offering mentorship, training programs, and other forms of learning, senior leaders can acquire the necessary skills to lead their people to innovate! It’s as simple as that. The chosen courses should cover everything from innovation strategies to creative problem-solving, people management, and more.

Fostering innovation has to start by nurturing those responsible for innovation. Not every leader is familiar with innovation management. This should be your number one starting point as you build a culture of innovation and create a library of great ideas.

Encourage Leaders to adopt Innovation Tactics and Techniques

We’ve all heard of “failing fast”, but our take on the matter is to “learn faster”. That said, shifting the mindset of leaders within an organization can help embrace innovation much quicker. Experimentation, creativity, and rejecting the fear of failure are all keep characteristics and approaches leaders should be encouraged to try by other managers.

Amazon has a very similar system called “Day 1”. A mentality that suggests leaders should approach every project or idea with agility, innovation, and customer-centricity. Key characteristics often found in startups, yet founder Jeff Bezos wants people to disregard the company’s size with this philosophy.

Preparing for Innovation Success in 2025

Innovation is pivotal to the growth and progress of businesses. As things like AI and automation take the working world by storm, organizations must adapt and adopt these technologies to stay ahead of the competition. Ways of working are also evolving, and with the rise of remote work and other dynamics, businesses must look for tools to combat innovation challenges.

Ultimately, 2025 will be an exciting time for organizations to revisit their innovation goals, get new systems and strategies in place, and leverage the latest innovation technology and tools.