Why Innovation Fails. Innovation is a key component of any enterprise, but failure is an intrinsic, inevitable part of the process.
Most products fail, most mergers and acquisitions fail, most projects fail and most startup ventures fail. All the innovation, entrepreneurial drive and creativity won’t keep your company afloat if it lacks a structure and operating blueprint that can guide its ongoing success and conquer all changes and challenges. The laundry list of companies failing despite innovative, new business models seems almost limitless: Founded as a single store in Dallas in 1985, Blockbuster quickly became a household name and withstood the historic transition from VHS to DVD.
But its failure to adapt fast enough as soon as Netflix and smaller rivals started mailing videos and selling videos-on-demand turned Blockbuster’s once ubiquitous storefronts into dinosaurs. Such flops by the best and brightest in their industry begs the question: How can avoid a similar fate? Learn to Love Failure. If you’re not failing every now and again, it’s a sign you’re not doing anything very innovative. - Woody Allen One of the toughest experiences in life is working hard on a demanding project, and then failing completely and utterly.
Failure can shake your confidence and make you question your abilities, but it is also an opportunity in disguise. Screwing Up On Purpose: The Beauty of The Deliberate Mistake. Often when faced with a difficult task we make a set of assumptions that dictate our actions. “I’m not good enough to get that client.” Or “I can’t go to that event, it’s too big-time for me.” We can sabotage ourselves before we even begin, afraid of failure or embarrassment. To tackle hard problems and to really stretch ourselves, sometimes we have to make a “deliberate mistake.” I ’ve been fascinated with deliberate mistakes since Paul Schoemaker and the late Robert Gunther introduced the idea in the Harvard Business Review in 2006. True deliberate mistakes are expected, on the basis of current assumptions, to fail and not be worth the cost of the experiment….
In other words: if we fail, we learn something. Consider an example from the sports world. Her assumption, was that her game was not good enough to turn pro this soon. Most deliberate mistakes, as expected, don’t work out. Scrutinize your assumptions – Our innermost assumptions are the fuel for deliberate mistakes. Why Success Always Starts With Failure. “Few of our own failures are fatal,” economist and Financial Times columnist Tim Harford writes in his new book, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure . This may be true, but we certainly don’t act like it.
When our mistakes stare us in the face, we often find it so upsetting that we miss out on the primary benefit of failing (yes, benefit): the chance to get over our egos and come back with a stronger, smarter approach. A ccording to Adapt , “success comes through rapidly fixing our mistakes rather than getting things right first time.” To prove his point, Harford cites compelling examples innovation by trial-and-error from visionaries as varied as choreographer Twyla Tharp and US Forces Commander David Petraeus.
I interviewed Harford over email to dig deeper into the counter-intuitive lessons of Adapt . The Wrong Way To React To Failure When it comes to failing, our egos are our own worst enemies. Denial. Chasing your losses. Hedonic editing. The Recipe for Successful Adaptation. Fail-often-p-2405-550x431.gif (GIF Image, 550 × 431 pixels) Failure Happens: Innovation and Serendipity. The Big Ten Innovation Killers - TheBigTenInnovationKillers.pdf. Top Ten Causes of Innovation Failure.
So who do you think form the group that are the most likely candidates for innovations consistent failure?
It may surprise you to know that most fingers point straight to the top of the organization as the main cause for its enduring failure. In a recent survey I was reading*, it provided a set of results about the common cause of innovation failure. I don’t think this is sour grapes of the people working away on innovation daily, that the ‘finger of failure’ is well and truly pointing upwards. The survey was asking participants to check all that applied and although there were 30-odd possible reasons the top ten that stand out as head and shoulders above all the others are nearly all down to the simple failure of innovation engagement in its leadership.
There is more often due to an innovation knowledge gap at board room level. So the top ten causes of innovation failure The top three failures Each of these is without doubt for me a top management failure. The next three failures Wait!
Collaboration for innovation.