Culture of innovation is the drive to the formal, established rules of doing business. An understanding of and commitment to the organization’s mission will guide employees when confronted by the unexpected for which no rues exist.

Here are the top six cultural reasons for innovation failure:

1. Not having a formal innovation management framework and systems
2. Not tying initiatives to overall company strategy
3. Not allocating cross-disciplinary resources
4. Not getting buy-in and ownership from cross-functional teams
5. Not creating intelligence driven options and scenarios
6. Not deploying measurement criteria and metrics

In his classic book, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Drucker describes innovation as a delicate dance between perception and analysis. Analysis, with all its discipline, must be based on a perception of change: “This requires a willingness to say, I don’t actually know enough to analyze, but I shall find out. I’ll go out, look around, ask questions, and listen.”

In an age of unanswerable questions, asking the right question might just be the answer.

Fast Company: Why Innovation Fails (PDF)