Let me start with the obvious: Innovation is the buzzword. In fact, it has been the buzzword for so long, you could say we’ve developed a cult around it.

Board of Innovation, a global consulting firm, estimates that there are about 70,000 books on innovation available for purchase right now. If you read at a pace of 20 pages per day, it would take you about 2,500 years to go through them all. Looking for a shortcut? A Google search will yield you nearly 2 billion results.  This publication alone offers 4,858 digital articles and 10,192 case studies.

Innovation’s public profile is matched by its priority on the CEO’s agenda. In 2019, 55% of company leaders participating in PWC’s 22nd Annual Global CEO Survey claimed “We are not able to innovate effectively,” which placed that skill gap on top of the list.  The 2020 C-Suite Challenge Report, published by the Conference Board, listed “building an innovative culture” among top-three most pressing internal concerns of 740 CEOs surveyed globally.

Whether in the classroom, the newsroom, or the boardroom, innovation is our global darling.

There is only one problem: We might love innovation. But most of our employees hate it.

I first discovered this dirty little secret shortly after leaving my safe job as a business school professor to start my own consulting business, focusing on, you guessed it, helping companies learn how to innovate.

Here I was, armed with the latest research, all fired-up with ideas for ways to help my first client, a global mining company, become more agile and innovative, only to find myself in the middle of a processing facility face to face with a line manager bluntly asking me: “Are you smoking something at the ExCom!?”

Since then, I’ve heard this same question posed in various ways at some point in every single project on which I’ve worked. Only a few weeks ago at the annual innovation jam of a global consumer goods company, I was told point blank: “For you people, innovation is all that. For us, it’s extra work with no results or —much worse — lost jobs.”

The data bear out these fears.   A research team at the University of Toronto surveyed 1,000 American and Canadian knowledge workers (all employed and with college degrees) to assess their attitudes towards innovation. In addition to measuring “drive to innovate,” the scientist looked into things like “grit” and “openness to risk” across two countries and three age groups (under 35, 35 to 44, and over 45).

While the drive for innovation among participants varied from 14% to 28%, only two of the six different groups measured broke the 25% mark. Willingness to take risk was even more telling: at best, 19% of your company is willing, with some age groups dipping as low as 11%.

And that’s the data for the two of the world’s most innovative countries. What are the rest of us to do?