It's not that projects particularly fail, they're just not as successful as you'd like them to be or the end point is not as you'd originally envisaged. There are many reasons for this; one of the most common threads running across 'failed' innovation projects is how quickly individuals and the team learn from the experience and reapply this knowledge effectively afterwards. Proctor & Gamble have been successful as a result of their constantly evolving innovation; learning from failure is built into their strategy.
We have worked with many service organisations where 'failure' is not allowed. Unfortunately the outcome for the business is that when learning doesn't take place, the knowledge cannot be applied to other projects or used for the improvement and development of the 'failed' venture.
There are many other factors related to innovation failure. Here are some of the most common which you may have come across.
- Operational driven innovation. This is where the business considers what it can deliver first, rather than allowing the customer's experience to drive new propositions
- Market insight unable to spark ideas for change. Traditional market research can be too blunt, lacking the reality and closeness with consumers to provide rich, fresh insights that stimulate creative thinking
- Immediacy. Businesses can sometimes over-react to the competition or feel they must do some type of activity, ploughing money and resource into a quick turn-around that can end up in continuous re-work (a common symptom of fear of failure). An element of incubation and reflection time is always needed.
- Changing business priorities. Businesses are increasingly short-term in their outlook, which means that they will weigh up competing opportunities on the basis of how quickly they believe income will be generated [remember it's amazing what you can convince yourself of in a spreadsheet!]. It is therefore important to have a balance of short, medium and long-term innovation ventures. This keeps businesses evolving new income streams and continually differentiating.
- Reacting to business problems too late. Often we're not open to and foreseeing opportunity in the market place because we are not connected to the world around us. As a result the business ends up ultimately 'fire-fighting' problems rather than encouraging proactive change
- Silos working. It's natural to want to work with people and with knowledge that makes us feel comfortable. However, this limits our ability to cross-fertilise and pollinate new ideas. A 'the way we do it here' attitude can be a big hurdle to new ideas and opportunities
- Lack of leadership. Lack of explicit encouragement, motivation and belief from the top team can bring stagnation and disengagement, which can lead to a complete derailment of the innovation
So 'failure' can take many guises. Identifying what they are, being open to accepting them and reapplying learning, means that you will evolve, so you can't really fail at all.