Innovation Leaders helping Innovators
Failure is a part of innovation. True. However, there is “good” failure and “bad” failure. A “good failure” example is validating a fair assumption and quickly/cheaply coming to the conclusion that assumption was wrong. The Innovator learned something new and can then adapt or discard the innovation.
But not all failure is “good”, acceptable or makes sense. Innovation Leaders should help the corporation to avoid these “bad failures”. A few examples:
Compliance
- A critical failure to avoid is one related to unethical or dangerous experiments. For instance: healthcare Innovators should never undertake experiments that put a patient’s safety or privacy in jeopardy.
- To anticipate unethical behavior, an appropriate corporate culture is essential. In addition, Innovation Leaders can help by instructing Innovators to engage with open minded, collaborative Compliance/Legal colleagues early in their innovation journey. These colleagues can help the Innovators to structure their innovation in a way that does not put patients at risk. This doesn’t mean healthcare Innovators should take zero risks, only never take risks that can do harm.
Repetition
- A logical failure to avoid is to learn the same thing twice, i.e. not realizing that someone else already did the same experiment.
- Innovation Leaders can make sure that learnings, including failures, are shared across the corporation. Sharing can be done e.g. through simple, searchable databases, allowing “new” Innovators to connect with the “failed” ones to learn from. This does not always mean that failed innovative ideas cannot be pursued again. Maybe the experiment can be done in a different way, based on the learnings from the failed one.
Financial
- Managers really dislike very expensive failures or those for which the returns were predictably unrealistic. I recall an innovative fruit juice delivery case study in which the cost of the innovation was so high that each consumer would have had to consume 4 liters (one gallon) of juice every day for the innovative product to break even. The Innovator could have known this cost/benefit ratio before he did the experiment.
- Innovation Leaders can help Innovators by creating a rough cost/return analysis before initiating an experiment. This doesn’t have to be over-complicated, generating “analysis-paralysis”. An example is the “Reverse Income Statement“
Turnover
- A real shame is when promising innovations fail because the Innovator moves on to another company.
- Innovation Leaders can anticipate this failure by securing a strong sponsor (who can assign a new champion when the original Innovator leaves) or by creating a small team of collaborators (one of them can continue the experiment if the original Innovator leaves).
Priorities
- This one is related to the previous (Turnover) example. Large corporations often change business priorities. This can happen at the level of the corporate strategy or for parts of the organization or for individual employees.
- If ongoing innovation experiments fall significantly outside of the new corporate priorities, it makes sense to avoid further investment. Innovation Leaders can evaluate if the innovation can be adapted to address the new priorities or can “license out” the innovation.
- Sometimes the innovation is still relevant for the corporation, but not for that part of the organization where the Innovator belongs to. Innovation Leaders can solve this issue by securing a global/central sponsor for whom the innovation is relevant, for example a global brand leader. This sponsor can assign a new champion to complete the innovation experiment or even to recruit the original Innovator.
There are many other reasons why innovations shouldn’t fail and ways how Innovation Leaders can play a role:
- the Innovator lacks critical expertise: the Innovation Leader can facilitate the right connections/collaborations
- the Innovator miscommunicates their ideas, starts with a solution, or innovates for a problem irrelevant for the corporation: the Innovation Leader can facilitate the storytelling
- the Innovator lacks resources: the Innovation Leader can connect the Innovator to potential sponsors
- the Innovator moves too fast to a Pilot: the Innovation Leader can educate the Innovator on the Innovation Framework
- etc.
As Oscar Wilde said:
“Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes”
So, as Innovation Leader, I identified all the (potential) reasons why innovations failed for the wrong reasons and put in place approaches to anticipate or address those unnecessary failures.
More about this topic: ‘There is Good Failure and Bad Failure.” by William Treseder.
Do you know any other ways Innovation Leaders can help avoid “bad failures”?
Click here for more of my blogs on innovation within corporations: Wim Vandenhouweele
