"Few businesses are any good at innovation. For all their brainstorming exercises and "open innovation" programs, they mostly just come up with reformulations of existing products, new pricing plans and basic updates--the same old things just a little cheaper, faster or better.
Businesses ask their "strategic customers" where to innovate and get little advice. Those customers are usually strategic only in that they are large, not because they have any particular market insight. They too just want more, better and cheaper, which are hardly recommendations for true innovation.
Why is failure the norm? Defending and extending the business is what we've trained our business leaders and managers to be good at. They know how to remain close to "core" by staying "focused." They work on improving "operational excellence" and seek the "low cost position" while striving for "customer intimacy" with the biggest customers." - Adam Hartung
"While it's probably impossible to compute the exact percentage of business initiatives that fail, it is widely acknowledged that most do. After years of research and observation, it is clear that the same reasons for any change initiative failure tend to be the same culprits that make innovation initiatives fail. Here are the top ten reasons for innovation failure:
1. Not creating a culture that supports innovation
2. Not getting buy-in and ownership from business unit managers
3. Not having a widely understood, system-wide process
4. Not allocating resources to the process
5. Not tying projects to company strategy
6. Not spending enough time and energy on the fuzzy front-end
7. Not building sufficient diversity into the process
8. Not developing criteria and metrics in advance
9. Not training and coaching innovation teams
10. Not having an idea management system" - Joyce Wycoff
"We believe that innovations fail in the marketplace based on one or more of four key issues:
a. Ideas don't solve an important problem for a customer
b. Ideas take too long to get to market/Shifts in needs
c. Ideas underfunded or poorly launched
d. Ideas require too much work to adopt" - Jeffrey Phillips
"On the other hand, FAILURE is not an easy concept to accept. Failure conjures up sweaty palms, racing heartbeats, and above all, the human condition of disappointment. Knowing that we, as human beings, have a distinct aversion to failure, how can product teams capitalize on early failures to ensure new product success? In this paper, we investigate three common causes of innovation failure and offer suggestions to enhance the probability of success for the development effort.
1. Lack of Strategy,
2. Lack of Risk-Taking, and
3. Company Culture."
"One reason for the lack of successful innovation and growth is the reality of the lifecycle"
"A company’s own historical success can be a major hurdle to new revenue streams" - John Kotter
Bottomline:
Most innovations fail. Most ideas die. Failures can be starting points for new innovations. But an organization needs to avoid the innovation blockers. Many a great innovators forget that successful innovations require great ideas plus execution. And execution involves many go-to-market steps... transforming an idea into an amazing product or service that everyone wants now, getting the marketing and sales team ready to promote and sell the product, creating an external buzz for the new product through launch events and trade shows, getting the customers to buy and adopt the new product, making customers brand ambassadors so that they share products and stories in the marketplace, and winning against the competition. Sometimes great products fail because of inadequate marketing. Sometimes average products win because of successful marketing. When a business combines great innovative products with great marketing (aka Apple), watch out!
Also see: Why Startups Fail?