Understanding Innovation Failure

It is time that we had a serious conversation about innovation. Never before has innovation been so important and it is well established that innovation is the key driver of a firm’s competitive advantage.  However, business leaders must be extremely frustrated when they read about the high failure rates of innovation. I have been successfully involved in innovating for a number of years and I know how important it is to businesses. So, I was struck by an academic paper (PANNE, Beers, & Kleinknecht, 2003) which was a study on success and failure in Innovation.  

So why, 22 years later, with all the new tools and techniques have we not made more progress in reducing failure rates? What’s going on? There is no shortage of so-called solutions. Design thinking and other such developments are obviously tools which are helpful but they still have not reduced the failure rates significantly. My belief is that the root cause of the problem is a lack of understanding of what innovation is. So, I was delighted to see that the ISO 56000 series standard is trying to address this issue by illustrating how innovation is not just a creative or idea-generating activity but a holistic process.

 Companies need to be good at not only coming up with good ideas but they need to be good at bringing these ideas to market. However, while standards are excellent at providing general guidelines, we still have the issue of implementation at company level. As they say “the devil is in the detail” and no more so than at the coal face where companies are faced with the day-to-day issues associated with managing and delivering innovative products and services.

Is there a successful approach to innovation and what is it? Get in touch for more details.