Innovation Fails because...

Innovation fails because everyone's talking about it instead of doing it collaboratively.

The reasons why failure occurs vary widely. It is no wonder why many leaders are reluctant to act on bold ideas with good business potential due to the high likelihood of failure. It’s better to play it safe than try harder and fail. How to highlight these failures so that others can be more successful in innovation than in the past? Innovation fails because:

Innovation fails because many organizations lack real support by senior management; lack the balls to invest in risk. Innovation fails because top Leadership doesn't understand how to "manage" innovation or treat the decision in the same way as a capital decision. Modern managers are wimps who expect assurances and answers up front, which cause them to overly invest in lame projects and under invest in projects with interesting potential.

Innovation fails because they lack cognitive ability to think alternatives. In addition, to TRUE sustained management support, businesses need to think hard about how their FUNCTION can be performed in other ways, especially in ways that they have background or expertise. It takes a combination of wacky and less risky ideas to balance out a robust portfolio worth investigating.

Innovation fails because they get de-risked in the development stage: Probably more common as ideas advance through the development process, they are "de-risked" to the point where they are not truly innovative by the time they are launched. Large organizations kill good ideas and thus are generally poor innovators.

 Innovation fails because innovation without adoption is hallucination: There is a myth that innovation may come out of a process and not individuals / innovators and  the innovation is not properly adopted or innovated to be adopted by the target audience.

 Innovation fails because the culture is too shallow of a mea culpa when explaining why change initiatives fail: In this case, change being attempts to innovate new ideas. Too often people do not understand the nature of change, why it's critical for organizations to remain competitive, and how they're part of the change in order to realize positive outcomes. For virtually all for-profit organizations, innovation is not a choice or nice to have, but rather an essential function to survive in today's highly competitive environment.

 Innovation fails because people start the innovation process without proper sized, prioritized platforms based on consumer needs: They may begin ideation in a host of ways that are founded on new technology, ethnographies, a cross-functional ideation, etc. without truly knowing if they are fishing (ideating) where the fish are.

Innovations fail because folks fear innovation: Innovations succeed when failure is seen as a learning step to great success. Someone has innovative ideas and ready to contribute, either they are not inspired to come up with or not ready to be heard by ignoring with a tag of word weird or crazy.

Innovation fails because... there are too many disconnects that occur between the birth of a vision/concept and the process of turning it into a reality: Lack of information actually gathered for the innovative ideas that come up. if one has innovative ideas there's lack of investment support. It takes a TEAM of bright individuals and executive sponsorship to review/evaluate ideas, offer feedback, and support ongoing development efforts. An overall framework for innovation with gate reviews will help sustain progress and minimize the risk of idea flops. Clearly it's important to invest in the right mix of ideas (both bold & simple) with supporting business cases.

Innovation fails because everyone's talking about it instead of doing it collaboratively. The intention of such brainstorming is to examine the causes of failure in innovation. The objective is to raise awareness of what's needed to improve the probability of success and improve the success rate of innovation.

Posted in: Innovation,Lessons from Failures