It's obvious why bad innovation teams fail. But great ones? Why do even they fail so often too?
My work across many companies and industries--plus the work I did in-house at corporations myself--comes back to this obnoxious and persistent question way too often.
Even beginning to solve it has taken hard work across many years. Here I share what I have learned that works in the real world.
So much has to go right in innovation. How can you ever make sure you get it all right?
A big field like innovation comes with buckets-full of success factors. Gobs of them! Enough to cause you analysis paralysis.
Even if you manage to break through that paralysis, it’ll take you hours to discuss (let alone implement) all those success factors.
I’ve tried it once, based on the insights of just a small subset of experts on the topic—Clayton Christensen, Melissa Perri, Rita Gunther McGrath, Roger Martin, Steve Blank, and Sydney Finkelstein. And even that was a major effort.
And don’t get me started on all the other sources of success factors at your disposal: Practitioner surveys, case studies, articles, books, your own experience, and on and on.
It’s a maddening game of whack-a-mole too. almost impossible to follow all the advice. And beyond that, most of it amounts to "point solutions" that only tackle part of the problem. No single fix realistically guarantees success. You need to make most or all factors work. And even then, there always seems to be one more problem.
But you can succeed anyway.
