Innovation Fails Because…

2014

The widespread interest in innovation is also combined with a sense of frustration. Many studies show that the success rate for innovation initiatives is not very high. Umair Hoque recently conducted an interesting experiment on Fast Company. He asked readers to complete the sentence – “Innovation Fails because…..”

Many people responded and continue to respond – Here are some recent results. The article lists the responses in the form of a running list. That is not very helpful, since I would have preferred to see the patterns, if there were any.

Some time back, I had shared a couple of presentations on Slideshare – “Modes in Innovation”, and “Innovation Praxis”. I decided to evaluate these responses using the frameworks I had proposed. The analysis is in the embedded document here below:

Failure-of-Innovation.docx

The classification of the responses in the various categories is not absolutely perfect or accurate, but it is a fairly good first approximation.

What is interesting to me is how people perceive why innovation fails. A disproportionate number of responses attribute the failure of innovation to issues related to what I would call innovation culture or ‘Practice’ in the terminology of our framework, with some attribution to poorly designed Programs.

What is even more interesting is how many of the other issues that actually contribute to Innovation success, such as proper Framing, Mobilization or Staging are or are not mentioned. There is almost no mention, for example, of the importance of Discovery – assessing what the current conditions are and whether or not the systemic elements that would contribute to success are present.

Culture is indeed one of the most important cause of failure across an enterprise. However, I hesitate to put all the blame on the shoulders of culture. There are many other factors that are necessary to ensure success and it is quite clear from this set of responses that people are not widely aware of what those might be. Some of the people who perhaps should know, such as the authors of these articles and Fast Company, should perhaps structure these responses and provide guidance to people to see how their understanding lacks a total systemic understanding of what innovation is. What use are such surveys otherwise?

Innovation fails because people do not understand its systemic nature and are not aware of the factors that need to be paid attention to in order to make it succeed.