Here is an excerpt from an article written by Scott Anthony for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, and sign up for a subscription to HBR email alerts, please click here.

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Is there a corporate leader who doesn’t extol the virtues of innovation these days? Yet if innovation is so important, why do so many companies have so much trouble with it?

The reflexive response is that it is a human capital problem — that is, that most people just don’t have what it takes to successfully innovate. I reject that view. Academic research in fact shows that almost anyone can become a competent innovator (with sufficient practice). I’ve seen countless examples of ordinary individuals displaying the creativity, ingenuity, and perseverance of the world’s great innovators.

Those people can only be effective in the right context, but, ironically, many of the things leaders do to encourage innovation actually kill it. Look carefully at your company and you might spot one of four types of unintentional innovation assassins.

[Here’s the first of the four.]

1. The Cowboy. Itching to create a corporate culture tolerant of creativity and innovation, the Cowboy says something along the lines of, “No boundaries! Just great ideas!” Of course, companies should continually evaluate and push their boundaries. But every company has a set of things it simply will not do. Saying innovation has no bounds when it does just leads people to waste time working on ideas that — honestly — have no hope of ever being commercialized.

Instead, consider issuing highly-focused challenges. For example, a few years ago Netflix offered a $1 million prize to any team that could improve the performance of the algorithms that determine which movies it should suggest to consumers by at least 10%. More than 250 teams rose to the challenge, and two actually exceeded the target. Focus is one of innovation’s best friends.

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The good news? Since unintentional innovation assassins are easy to identify, they are also easy to disarm. Constrain the Cowboy, bound the Googlephile, ground the Astronaut, and make the Pirate walk the plank — and watch innovation efforts soar.

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Scott leads Innosight’s Asian operations. His fourth book on innovation, The Little Black Book of Innovation, was published by Harvard Business Review Press (January 2012). You can follow him on Twitter at@ScottDAnthony.