Many economic studies have examined the conditions under which innovation occurs in Canadian firms. We take the opposite view and look at the impediments to innovations perceived by Canadian firms. We focus on three service sectors: communication, financial services and technical business services. The data come from the 1996 innovation survey conducted by Statistics Canada. The first objective of this paper is to explain why firms perceive the obstacles to innovation differently. We do so by performing a data analysis and an econometric analysis. The second objective is to find out whether some obstacles are complementary. If there is complementarity, a systems approach is called for to efficiently remove the innovation barriers.