Businesses must not forget about the impact of people when it comes to discussing products and services.

Michael Schrage, a research fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan Centre for Digital Business, wrote on Harvard Business Review that it is a common "innovation dysfunction" to focus solely on an idea and forget about the users or customers.

Executives in project manager jobs may struggle to meaningfully budget around a product without accounting for people; sometimes this aspect is taken for granted and other times it is simply glossed over in favour of the technical aspects of a concept, according to Mr Schrage.

The innovation expert described a recent conversation he overheard, saying: "Whenever innovators gather, I always listen for what's not discussed. In almost 50 minutes of detailed discussion (yes, I am that kind of eavesdropper), I heard not a single mention, reference or allusion to the challenge of training people onsite on how best to use or learn from the prototype."

If companies want to make their innovation networks flow more quickly, they may want to consider the concept of 'open innovation', which Science Business analyst Gail Edmondson claimed can cut across industries and countries to speed up progress.

She described how this collaborative research approach is starting to deliver a number of useful lessons, such as the idea that intellectual property issues can be navigated and how governments can be the catalysts for cross-regional innovation.

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