Don’t be afraid of failure

Innovation performance is, without a doubt, challenging.

According to late HBS professor Clayton Christensen, 95% of all product innovations fail, and according to Start up Genome report, 92% of start ups fail.

While the accuracy of the previous numbers can be debated, according to the McKinsey Globale Innovation Survey, only 6% of executives are satisfied with their innovation performance.

What’s more, according to the 2017 PWC Innovation Benchmark, 54% of innovating organisations have trouble bridging the gap between innovation strategy and the larger business strategy.

As such, it is quite safe to assume that there’s plenty of room for improvement when it comes to innovation.

The top two most innovative companies according BCG, Apple and Alphabet/google have also long list big innovation failures / flops.

Apple: Sapphire, Newton, Rokr, Pippin, Lisa; Alphabet/Google: Lively, Knol, Wave, Nexus, Google+, Glass; See also: https://www.cbinsights.com/research/corporate-innovation-product-fails/?

Is this bad or wrong??

What difference does it make, as long as the innovations that succeed compensate for the inherent failures.

But how? What if we could solve that?

In an ugly managed innovation portfolio the market is flooded with non differentiating propositions. You might be beter off stopping investing. In a badly managed portfolio there is an innovation tunnel with random market succes. In a better managed innovation portfolio there is clear screening of ideas before execution. And even better during the innovation execution bad projects are stopped creating an innovation funnel.?Plenty of ideas are created and actively managed in the innovation funnel and only a well selected quantity of ideas make it to market for a block buster success.

The successes (high reward) compensate for the inherent failures (high risk). And failures are high learning experiments feeding new ideas to enter the process. Fail fast and learn!

The gambler (Kenny Rogers):

‘You've got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em,

Know when to walk away, know when to run.

You never count your money when you're sittin' at the table,

There'll be time enough for countin' when the dealin's done.’?